I spent a little time yesterday working on a class that provides
a wrapper around the MediaWiki API. It makes quite a nice example
of how the QNetworkAccessManager API can be combined with
QXmlStreamReader to quickly access web services. The code, as you'll
see, is very simple.

First lets take a look at the constructor and the data members. We
specify the path to the api.php file of the wiki we want to query,
and setup the network access manager.

Just watched a very clever advert for the new iphone.

• It's a manual, it shows you how to download (and buy) new apps.
• It's very short, just one feature
• User ends up having fun - playing game, and then call from a guy
• Interupting you in the middle of the game is presented as a feature!
• Slogan about this changing everything (not sure how it's supposed to do so)

The advert seems well put together, but I wonder if we couldn't create something similar regarding KDE features?

As you've seen from all the stores on the dot and on planetkde this week has seen all the KDE
developers gathering in Mechelen in Belgium. The organisation this year has
been excellent - even the network (usually the achilles heel of KDE
conferences) has worked from day one.

As well as the usual socialising, talks and BoF sessions there has also been a
lot of coding. I've focussed on ksnapshot and plasma, KSnapshot gained a few
minor changes:

This is the draft design for a new widget API for plasma, it will be appearing on techbase later, but here's what we're thinking.

General Notes

The intention of this API is to provide a very simple way for users to create
plasma applets. The API can be used both for scripting and from C++. For the
simple javascript API, this API will be all that is provided allowing us to
run untrusted applets as they will not have access to any dangerous
facilities.

After a day's work at the Plasma sprint, there's already quite a lot of news
to report. After a lot of trawling through log files, I was able to fix the
problem that was preventing the Plasma binding plugin from loading. In the end
it was something simple (as usual) namely that the method that allows the
plugin to load was not being compiled into the module since it was missing
from the generated .pri file. Once this was fixed, it was simply a matter of
changing the name of the extension we load from 'qt.plasma' to

As some of you may have seen, Kent has released the QtScript binding generator on Troll Tech labs. I've been playing with the code for a bit, and as with KJSEmbed one of the first tests was to make sure you could use it to write a simple web browser. Kent recently added support for QUiLoader to the bindings and as a result, I can use the QWebView designer plugin to make things simple. The result is a basic web browser in less than 10 lines of javascript:

In 4.0 plasma had support for writing applets using Qt's built in javascript interpreter QtScript, but the facilities have been fairly limited. In KDE 3.x KJSEmbed gave us reasonably complete bindings to the Qt and KDE api's, allowing us to write applications such as a web browser in 10 lines of javascript. I'm glad to say that some plans that were discussed at the KDE conference in Glasgow are now a reality and Kent has released a qtscript binding generator based on the one used for QtJambi.

I learnt a something new about XML today, a part of the specification that deals one of the many edge cases that exist in every file format. To illustate this, lets take a look at a few examples. Why is this XML document well-formed :

<test>X</test>

this one also well-formed:

<test>& #9;</test>

But this document isn't:

I was reading a blog post on beautiful code about different styles of programming earlier this week. The author was comparing the 'ruby style' of direct access to member variables with the getter/setter pattern common in Java code. His basic question was is this simply a matter of your programming background?

Here's the Java version of his example:

I finally got my hands on an EEE PC on Friday after having waited for nearly a month for the one I ordered by mail order to arrive. I found out that 'Toys R Us' had some stock and checked that the one in manchester had some. Now I've just got the difficult decision of whether to cancel my original order or not!