Plasma Components

Hi,

I'm here to talk about my GSoC project (\m/), the plasma components. As you may know, QML is a declarative language to build rich interfaces introduced in Qt 4.7 by providing simple primitives. As it is a powerful way to develop interfaces and it's the future of UI development for Qt was necessary to make the plasma support it.

Create interfaces in QML is really easy and fast but sometimes we need common widgets and may be boring to reimplement and replicate them in every application we create (e.g. Button, Slider, ScrollBar). For avoid this code replication, the Qt Components project was created to unify an API for a set of components.

The current (often updated) defined components and it's API can be found at QTCOMPONENTS-200. The Qt Components intends to be a cross platform, but sometimes we need to have a closer integration of the component and the platform. In plasma desktop we want to show tooltips or use the theme svg images for example. The common API defines a set of properties a component must have, but doesn't disallow to have extra properties and functionalities (suggestions ?). Creating the plasma components with the theme integration and adding plasma behaviour is what my GSoC project is about :-).

I already started working on the plasma components. They can be found in the kde-runtime repository at the plasma/declarative branch. And more speciffically in the plasma/declarativeimports/plasmacomponents directory. The components which already there are not yet done, they lack of tooltips, keyboard events handling, focus policy, and some (CheckBox and RadioButton) hasn't images yet. However they're fully functional and they cover all the properties and behaviours defined in the common API. Here is the list of the components in this state mentioned above (until this post publication):

• BusyIndicator
• Button
• CheckBox
• RadioButton
• Slider

These are components not present in the common API but they're highly wanted in plasma:

• ScrollBar
• ListItem
• ListItemView
• ListHighlight

To test these components, its also kept a components gallery (plasma/declarativeimports/test/Gallery.qml) that you may view it with qmlviewer (after installing the components).

Gallery screenshot

Feedback is highly appreciated. ;-)

Cheers!