GUI Libraries

My first project in KDE was maintaining KOffice. This was years ago already. Later I was forced to use Java at work and have been doing that for some 6 years now. I recently left that job, but I still have a nice chunk of work from that job available as an open source project I started and worked on during that time together with some colleagues and volunteers.

This open source project is adding to Java/Swing all the nice things I was used to having in KDE. Think i18n and signal/slots and xmlgui as well as things like a GroupBox or colorbutton class. I really tried to make it a marriage of technologies; best of both worlds.

Last Monday I did a 2.0 release of the collection of tools/framewords. This was more to fix the API then anything else since there were occasional bugfixes but no major changes for some time. Call it a signal to say we find it stable. I'm quite surprised that in 5 days we already have over 250 downloads. This software may be more popular then I thought :)

So, what is this blog doing on kdedevelopers.org? Well, I'm mostly pretty proud of a mature and really well received piece of work. But there are lots of ideas in there that KDE would be able to learn from. I did not just rewrite KDE technologies there, but also reused Java technologies and ideas from even other places. For example; the recent collapsible groupbox addition from Danimo has been in there for some time now, including animating collapse:

(and 1 2 3 4)

Other ideas are the tooltip placement on a kSqueezedTextLabel so the text on the tooltip is exactly in the same spot as the text on the label. All the way up-to making signal/slots multithreading with various ExecutePolicies. A really powerfull concept unique to the User Interface Collection (http://uic.sf.net).

For me the parser that reads QtDesigner files and outputs Java code still has meaning even if I don't really program Java Swing that often anymore. The outputter can be retrofitted to output Java code for the KDE-qt bindings for Java quite easilly overcoming one big stumbling block for Java programmers that want to use KDE.