As I told you some days ago, I (me and Kiko) had a short talk about Kommander in the university. We talked about it mainly because all of the subjects we wanted to talk about were already taken when we decided to talk about it.
I don’t think Kommander is going to change the world, but it can be a powerful environment where we can make our own applications using the embedded Qt Designer they have and the code we enter in every widget, with the power of dcop. The idea is quite simple, we enter some script into every widget which will be executed when the widget is activated (e.g. a PushButton is pushed). This idea reminds me very much my old times behind VB6, but it is not as powerful the privative one sadly. This program is separed between a kmdr-editor and a kmdr-executor which interprets the files created with the first one.
After seeing the projects that use Kommander (seen in www.kde-apps.org) we can see that most of them are programs based on short lines used in every widget, with only a few conditional or iterative sentences which are the ones that make programming fun… Kommander is not fun actually, so: How could we make Kommander a bit funnier?
I think the main problem it has is that it needs the kmdr-executor and deppends on it. IMHO it could be much better if instead of using this code full of @ and odd bash tricks interpeted we generated a Python or Ruby project. Like this, it could be used to generate the project from Kommander to do simple things, newbies could introduce themselves into KDE programming and if we wanted to modify it further, we could do it over code and over Kommander. If dropping bash use is a problem, we can letting user choose what language to use in every widget (even different languages in the same project, which could be fine for cut&paste projects :))
Perhaps I’ve left a bit the goal of the project, but I think it could be a nice thing to have BTW :). Perhaps a different project, perhaps my next project. 😉
Bye.
PS: The presentation and examples can be found here.