[Portland] Bonobo/KParts interoperability

[Dmitry M. Shatrov]

On Чтв, 2006-05-04 at 22:03 +0400, Maxim Udushlivy wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> I have a couple of questions about one interesting Medium Term Task: 
> "Link and embed objects between KParts and Bonobo". Could you please 
> give more info on implementation details? Will it allow only embedding 
> Bonobo UI control in KParts UI container and vice versa? Or will it be a 
> new Component Framework like the one described in these papers:
> http://people.redhat.com/~hp/proposal/proposal.html
> http://people.redhat.com/~hp/runtime-roadmap/runtime-roadmap.html
> 
> Kind Regards,
> Maxim Udushlivy

Hi, Maxim.
I was once looking at the task of KParts/Bonobo integration, described
some ideas at http://gparts.blogspot.com/ but my SoC proposal wasn't
accepted, so.. :)
After seeing this blog several people (Michael Meeks being one of them)
bothered to warn me that Bonobo is not that relevant anymore, there's
not much Bonobo components out there and almost all of them are tightly
integrated into GNOME without much value for non-GNOME programs.
But of course you CAN use both KParts and Bonobo in one program if you
need to. I think that building a common interface to them doesn't make
sence. Embedding a foreign-toolkit GUI control is really simple thanks
to XEmbed conventions (or even the simpliest XReparentWindow). And then
the only thing left is to parse XML UI descriptions and create Qt
menus/toolbars for Bonobo UI components and Gtk+ menus/toolbars for
KParts. I tried to implement the latter and that went fine.
Consider the following link:
http://www.scheinwelt.at/~norbertf/common_main_loop/
At the bottom there's a screenshot of my proof-of-concept mockup showing
KHTML embedded inside a Gtk+ program. The idea is that menus and
toolbars should be restored from KParts XML UI description, but there is
code for menus only (and no icons).

Dmitry