New year at a new desk

New year means some snow and cold noses here in Warsaw, and a new job to me, this time in the mobile industry, what has rather diversified my day, and that's good. Happy 2009 to you, to your friends and family.

But I am on the KDE board too, it's not going to change. What's recently time-consuming for me is <a http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Kexi/Porting#Forms_Refactoring">refactoring of the Native Kexi Forms. The most serious and anticipated decision is dropping the (implemented in 2004..2005) idea of the forms component reusable at a rich API level for other applications. The idea has introduced too man layers after months of development, too many to have things maintainable, with just proof-of-concept KFormDesigner being the only app using the framework except Kexi.

Since 2005 things have changed, Qt Designer gained its own reusable libraries. Before someone asks - we don't use them in Kexi Forms not just because that would affect the licensing (LGPL) or because of backward compatibility required by the current Forms' XML format (which is ~95% the same as Designer's but the 5% makes the difference). My point (or read it as feelings) is that while there would be no technical overhead in reusing Qt Designer, we would have overhead counted in man-months.

The first step, mostly finished now was to remove Qt3 Support dependencies. A bit late? True, but not too late. The code using the meta objects and properties is too fragile to receive massive changes in one go. Unlike KoProperty that received rather massive rewrite to Qt4's model/view API (I am not 100% happy with the results yet ) since last summer, Forms are more complex and I am employing strategy of incremental improvements for them. But after all, did I mention that continuous advances in many other parts of KOffice (if not just entire KDE 4) work as true motivation?