“This tutorial aims to demonstrate how easy it is to write
plugins for KDE 2 using KParts. It took me about 20 minutes to get
my first plugin working, and hopefully after reading this, you will
find it just as straight forward. The same mechanism applies to any
KPart based application, so once you understand what’s here you
should be able to write plugins for pretty much any application or
component in KDE!”
“KPart based applications such as Konqueror allow you to
dynamically load components and actions, and provide facilities to
merge the UIs of these components with that of the application.
This sounds really complicated, but all it means to us is that the
KParts framework does all the work, and we can pretty much forget
about it. We write our code as normal, then write a little piece of
boiler plate code and an XML file to set things going.”
“To KParts, a plugin is a way to extend an application, a part,
or even another plugin. A plugin is only an extension to something
else, and can’t be used on its own. The most visible way plugins
extend applications is by adding new commands to the menus and
toolbars, in KParts these are automatically integrated with those
of the host application using XML and KActions. In addition to this
automatic functionality, the plugin can use the standard KParts
interfaces and those defined by the parent application to add or
change the behaviour of its host.”