kommander/README


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Kommander v1.0Alpha series
Eric Laffoon <sequitur@kde.org>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Kommander is a visual dialog building tool which may be expanded to create
full mainwindow applications. The primary objective is to create as much 
functionality as possible without using any scripting language. This is
provided by the following features:
* Specials - these are prefaced with an "@" like @widgetText. The offer 
special features like the value of a widget, functions, aliases, global 
variables and such.
* DCOP integration - this allows Kommander dialogs to control and be 
controled in interactions with other KDE applicatins. It is a very powerful 
feature!
* Signals and Slots - this is a little less intuitive to a new user. It is 
under review for how we process things in the first major release. These
offer a limited event model for when a button is pushed or a widget is 
changed. Combined with "Population Text" it is rather powerful.

The central key feature of Kommander dialogs is that you can bind text 
(Kommander Text) to a widget. So if you have @widget1 and @widget2 and 
they are line edits you can set Kommander to show their contents by 
entering @widgetText in their Kommander Text area. Then enter hello in 
@widget1 and world in @widget2. A button can have the string
My first @widget1 @widget2 program in Kommander
If you run this dialog from a console it will output
My first hello world program in Kommander

Hopefully you begin to see a small glimmering of the potential. Kommander
enables a much faster design model for simple applications because if allows
you to stop thinking so much about language and revert to the more basic and 
natural conceptual model. In computers language is a means to define concepts
and as such it is a layer between concept and implementation that can impede
progress with minutia. Kommander seeks to minimize that layer. 

Kommander also seeks to build on standards. It is built on the Qt Designer
framework and creates *.ui files which it renames to *.kmdr. It can easily
import any KDE widget and this can be done without having to rebuild 
Kommander, by using plugins.

Kommander's other significant factor is how it addresses the requirements of
language. Computer languages can be wonderful things but they tend to have
their own dogmas and zealots often seeking to provide an advance to GUI 
design in an integrated development environment. Ironically the accpetance
of such IDEs is limited by the number of people willing to adopt a new new 
language to gain access to a desired feature. It is really not reasonable to 
expect people to need to change over to a dozen languages to access various
feature sets. By being language neutral and allowing a Kommander dialog to be
extended by using any scripting language Kommander positions it's self in a 
unique position for wide spread adoption. Multiple script languages can be
used in a single dialog and applications can be taken over by people using 
a different language than the original developer and gradually converting
and extending it. New widgets and featurs can be instantly leveraged by all
available languages. 

We hope that Kommander begins to get the developer support and recognition 
required to achieve the potential it offers. Our end goal is to make Kommander 
useful for novice users to extend and merge their applications. At the same 
time it should become a good prototyping tool. Also it opens the door to the 
promise of open source in a new way. We know that people can extend our GPL'd
prgrams, but the fact remains very few have the skills. With Kommander those
numbers see a huge multiplier! Some applications may be most logical as a
Kommander application. We already use it in areas we want to allow 
extensibility in Quanta Plus.

We hope you enjoy Kommander. Please help us with bug reports and example 
dialogs, as well as any requests you may have. You can join our user list
for help developing Kommander applications at 
http://mail.tdewebdev.org/mailman/listinfo/kommander 

Best Regards from the Kommander development team!