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so plasma has beeing ripping along this week with the highlights, aside from the usual bug and API fixing, being:
libplasma:
- scripted applets, currently JavaScript only
- configuration and package frameworks all plugged together for applets
- new generic status change indication widget for applets to use
- new layouting code that actually works!
- work on the three level zoom (full desktop, desktop groups and overview)
- reworking of applet background rendering underway
- weather now supports NOAA as well as 5 day forecasts where available
- englishbreakfastnetwork (ok, it's new to me ;)
- bluetooth engine takes shape
- solid based engines continue to grow in capabilities
- traditional desktop (aka show the contents of a folder on disk + hardware devices) for backwards compatibility
- digital clock
- 3D earth
- MacOS dashboard widgets (and hopefully Opera widgets soon)
I would like to say something briefly about the fact that we only have JavaScript right now. We had to start somewhere, and with QtScript we had a really good option. It's easy to create bindings to objects at runtime, it's very fast and someone, Richard J. Moore, stepped up with actual code. as Richard says, "An example of scripted applets is the Tiger applet. The script code is responsible for loading the SVG image, rendering it to the screen and even for loading the configuration dialog. Taken togther, this shows that the script facility can already meet requirements of simple applets: support for more complex applets written as scripts will be available soon".
It's helping to refine the API we are exporting to the script interpreter and proving out the loading and other necessary systems. Once that work is done we'll come back to examine the multi-language issue, which will include issues beyond simple language options and look at resource consumption, ease of sharing between systems and other complexities (e.g. in documentation). I think it's still a good chance we'll see Python and Ruby support, but for the immediate I'm happy with JavaScript as a language we can use to get the house in order first before inviting in more guest languages.