Articles in the Nepomuk category

• kdev-qmljs 1.7.0 released

  Published on ven 12 décembre 2014 in Nepomuk, (Comments)

  I'm pleased to announce that the kdev-qmljs plugin that I've developed during the spring and the summer is finally released in version 1.7.0. This version is compatible with KDevPlatform 1.7.0 and KDevelop 4.7.0. You can download the source tarball on download.kde.org.

  • SHA256Sum: 70927785de7791335eda43b55ef7742af7915425823d5f70b97edac1828681e1
  • SHA1Sum: 78ad0f72ffa091f6aff5ea633eb5f135e9d625f3
  • MD5Sum: e51b93519e4eb028a8863c5d7bc96848

  This release contains all the features developed during the summer. It adds support for the QML and Javascript languages in KDevelop and is able to recognize Javascript variables, functions, "objects" (based on prototype oriented programming) and most of its standard library (along with the DOM standard library and core Node.js modules). The QML language supports Qt 4 and Qt 5 modules, custom binary modules (modules for which you have an .so file), modules in your application and all sorts of import statements.

  More advanced support for Node.js, richer QML helper tools and some other features will be available in the KF5 version of the plugin. I hope to have time to work on it shortly.

  The tarball that I linked hereabove is known to compile and work on Fedora and a preliminary package has already been created (the final one will come shortly I think). Thanks again to everyone who helped me develop this plugin and fix bugs (especially my mentor Sven Brauch, Milian Wolf who dived into the deepest parts of KDevelop in order to fix a memory corruption issue, Kevin Funk and Aleix Pol who gave me advice on how to properly implement some parts of the plugin). Thanks again to the whole KDE community for the support and encouragement, and to the sysadmins who do a wonderful job to get everything working.

• Using Baloo in Dolphin and Apidox love

  Published on jeu 11 septembre 2014 in Nepomuk, (Comments)

  I've not blogged for nearly a month, but it does not mean that nothing has happened. I'm quite busy with university stuff (more on that later), but here are three things that may interest you.

  Dolphin meets Baloo

  Dolphin has supported Baloo for a very long time and is able to display semantic places like "Today" and "This month" in the right-hand box that lists your preferred folders and your drives. It also allows you to perform simple queries that consist in looking for files containing specific words.

  A couple of weeks ago, I ported the Baloo natural query parser and the Baloo query builder widget to KF5. This allowed me to use the parser and the query builder widget in the KF5 version of Dolphin. You now have syntax highlighting in the Dolphin search box, and more advanced queries are now possible:

  

  Note that we are in September 2014 and all the results are from August 2014. There is not result before or after August 2014.

  

  Some bug fixes were needed for Baloo to work properly with Dolphin, and they have been pushed upstream (in the now KF5-based master branches of kde:baloo and kde:baloo-widgets). The patch to Dolphin that makes it use the query builder widget has been pushed to the frameworks branch of kde:kde-baseapps.

  Comments on api.kde.org

  This feature has been talked about in Randa, but it took time for it to be implemented. The reason is that api.kde.org is a static website, and adding comments to it is not as simple as submitting a patch to a PHP or Python project. api.kde.org needs to talk to a remote service in Javascript, and the comments must be persisted somewhere.

  In order not to depend on any proprietary service, the KDE sysadmins decided to avoid Disqus (an online commenting service that offers a Javascript API so that static websites, like my blog, can still have comments on them). Choosing an alternative took a bit of time because they are numerous yet of varying quality. Finally, Juvia has been chosen.

  The KDE sysadmins installed Juvia (implemented in Ruby) and set up a database. I also opened an Akismet account for the comments (Akismet is an automatic spam filtering service). Last but not least, the api-comments mailing-list has been created, and I invite the maintainers of Frameworks appearing on api.kde.org to subscribe to this list so that they are kept informed of the comments.

  The comments are not yet on-line (I'm waiting for a final "ship it" for my review request), but will hopefully be soon. Working on this gave me the chance to work with the sysadmins, and they are very friendly and very competent people! Hats off to them!

  

  QML/Javascript for KDevelop 4 about to be released

  One last thing that I've done at the beginning of September is preparing kdev-qmljs for a release. This is not yet an official release because KDevelop 4.7 (and KDevPlatform 1.7, on which kdev-qmljs depends on) has not yet been released. Once this is done, I'll ask packagers to test my release tarball, because it is the first one that I make and I don't know if everything is correct. By the way, if you have an installed KDevelop 4.7 from Git, don't hesitate to test my tarball (check that it compiles, installs and that the unit tests pass once it has been installed).

  Artificial Intelligence and Masters thesis

  Now, some words about the future. In Belgium, the university starts on September 15, next Monday. This means that I will have to attend the lectures and to work for the university. Moreover, I'm entering my fourth year, the first year of Masters. At the end of my fifth year, I will have to present a thesis (also named memoir, but I don't know which word is the most correct or clear).

  This is a bit more personal, but I'm preparing my thesis for several years now. I worked on pattern recognition in human writing more than two years ago and finally implemented the Baloo query parser as a pattern matcher. I've also written a paper about my experiments on very fast memory-mapped persistent data stores.

  Why am I thinking about that for so long? Usually, students start to wonder on which subject they could write their thesis at the end of the fourth year, not at the very beginning of their university studies. The reason is that my subject, using pattern recognition as I did for the Baloo query parser but for all the human senses (recognizing musics, speech, objects in images, understanding sentences, etc) is very risky. I don't know if what worked for Baloo will be applicable to all the human senses, so two outcomes are possible:

  • Everything works
  • Everything works for a moment (I consider the Baloo query parser a success, it parses correctly anything thrown at it) but collapses once I attempt to do more complicated things.

  If the subject collapses at one time, I would prefer it to do so as early as possible so that I can work on something else and still get my degree. This is the reason why I've been working on it for so long. I need to be sure that I will end up with something working and interesting before committing to this subject. But things are pretty encouraging so far :-) .

• Baloo Natural Query Parser ported to KF5

  Published on ven 22 août 2014 in Nepomuk, (Comments)

  In 2013, My GSoC project was about implementing a natural (or "human") query parser for what was then Nepomuk. The parser is able to recognize simple Google-like keyword searches in which sentences like "videos accessed last week" can also be used. Sample queries include "KDE Baloo, size < 2M" and "files modified two months ago, Holidays, tagged as Important". An explanation of how the parser can extract the advanced information and of which queries are possible can be found here.

  Since then, many things have happened. First, Nepomuk was replaced by Baloo, and the query parser has been ported to Baloo. Then came the KDE Frameworks 5 and Baloo was ported to them (branch frameworks of kde:baloo). The port went well, but the query parser had been disabled in the KF5 version of Baloo.

  This week, I have given some love to the QueryParser. First, it was renamed to NaturalQueryParser, because there is another query parser in Baloo (one for simple Xapian queries). Then, I ported it along with the query builder widget to KF5. Finally, I added the possibility to use KFileMetaData to match specific file properties when performing a search. You can now explicitly filter the results of a search by using "width > 300" (the width of an image), "artist contains KDE" (the artist having performed something), etc. The list is independent from Baloo and the query parser does not have to be modified when new properties appear.

  Here is a screenshot. It is not yet particularly exciting (except that it is entirely KF5-based), and the auto-completion for property values is still quite basic, but more features are coming and should make this widget way more user friendly:

  

  All of this is currently waiting for being reviewed, but can already be tested by checking out the branch naturalqueryparser of Baloo and Baloo Widgets (kde:baloo and kde:baloo-widgets). These branches are based on frameworks and therefore require the Frameworks in order to be compiled.

• Google Summer of Code 2014: QML/Javascript language support for KDevelop 4 and 5

  Published on lun 18 août 2014 in Nepomuk, (Comments)

  Hi,

  Today is the end of the Google Summer of Code 2014 coding period. This year, I added support for the QML and Javascript languages in KDevelop. Both languages were added at the same time because QML is a superset of Javascript (one can embed JS snippets in QML files).

  This has been a very exciting project. I started working on it on March 9, 2014, a bit before the community bonding period started, and I added features for nearly six months since then. The QML/JS language support for KDevelop (which lives in kde:kdev-qmljs, branch kde4 for KDE4 code, branch frameworks for KF5) is now complete and functional. Sure, there are always features that can be added (and I give some examples at the end of this blog post), but Javascript and QML files are now reliably parsed, and several developers already use the plugin. A released version may come shortly.

  Features

  Here is a list of screenshots, each with a short description, listing the most important features of the QML/JS plugin. This list is intented to be a summary of what have been developed during the GSoC period, so that the users know what they can expect from the plugin. This is a list of features available in both the KDE4 and the KF5 version of the plugin. The screenshots come from already-published blog posts, so please forgive me if something does not look exactly as it is now :-) .

  Type inference of function parameters when a function is called. This is needed because a function usually does not assign a value to its parameters, so normal type inference cannot be used.

  

  Function call-tips, with the name of the parameters and best matches:

  

  Field members and array members:

  

  Understanding of complex Javascript features like prototype-oriented programming:

  

  Javascript "classes" and import of Javascript files in QML (this screenshot actually shows many features :-) ):

  

  And it also has support for Node.js modules (thanks to Àlex Fiestas who repeatedly asked me for this feature):

  

  Support for ECMAScript and DOM types (QML/JS understands as many DOM types as Webkit, from which I've taken the .idl description files):

  

  KDevelop can now display a list of QML properties:

  

  When you write a signal handler, the parameters of the signal handler are part of the current context:

  

  Some helper widgets allow you to quickly enter a QML property value:

  

  KDevelop 5 features

  KDevelop 5 being based on Qt5 and KF5, more features become possible. For instance, the QtQuick.Controls module allows the QML/JS plugin to display a nice font chooser (that is a read-only font preview in KDE4):

  

  A new "problems" infrastructure has been added. QML/JS now displays problems when it is absolutely sure that there is something wrong (a mismatch between QML types when both types are sure, for instance, or a missing imported module, so that the user knows why some symbols are not resolved properly):

  

  Code-completion for Node.js require statements:

  

  Future plans

  The official coding period is now finished. It has been a wonderful experience and I had the occasion to meet many interesting people. I would like to give many thanks to Sven Brauch, my mentor, who has helped me understand the KDevelop code-base. His Python plugin has also been a great inspiration for me. I'm unable to remember how many times I thought "I don't know what to do, let's see what Python does".

  Other people also greatly helped me. For instance, Aleix Pol gave me advice at the very beginning of the coding period and at the very end (just now, in Randa!), Milian Wolff carefully reviewed most of my commits and review requests and was of great help when I had problems with the most internal parts of KDevelop, and Kevin Funk (who worked on kdev-clang for his GSoC) fixed many annoying bugs in KDevPlatform. I also thank every early user of kdev-qmljs who posted nice comments on my blog, encouraged me, and asked for features. Special thanks for Àlex Fiestas without whom half the features of QML/JS would not exist.

  Regarding the future, I'll start by being honest and say that I need some sleep. I've worked more than full-time for six months, in addition to the university, because I can't stop working when I'm excited by what I'm doing. Now I need some days of rest, and I will also work a bit on the Baloo query parser that needs some love in order to be fully usable. It is already ported to KF5 and interesting things are coming, more on that (with screenshots) in a couple of days :-) . After that, I'll continue working on what I like: Baloo, KDevelop (QML/JS and other things), and api.kde.org.

• Randa: Meeting many people and working together

  Published on mer 13 août 2014 in Nepomuk, (Comments)

  The Randa Meeting 2014 is all about having tens of KDE developers and contributors hacking together in the mountains of Switzerland. While we enjoy the wonderful food and the impressing surroundings, this meeting is also the perfect place for new features and new ideas. Even more importantly, people from all around the world and from all the KDE sub-communities are very close to each other, and we can in fact hear what people are saying in the other rooms.

  Being this close to each other is wonderful because it allows a very fast and very efficient sharing of ideas. This blog post will list several features that were implemented in the past days and that concern the KDevelop team, and you will see that they are very diverse.

  KDevelop 5 on Windows

  

  The KDE On Windows team is doing an amazing work and they managed to port KDevelop 5 on Windows. KDevelop 5 works, along with all the frameworks and other libraries on which it depends. This means that Windows now has a complete and feature-full IDE that understands C++, highlights the structure of the code, allows navigation between declarations and their uses, knows the types of the variables, can provide code-completion for class members, variables, include files, etc. Several code-generation and refactoring operations are also possible, like renaming a class/method/variable or the automatic scaffolding of .cpp files (you write the .h file, KDevelop generates the method definitions in the .cpp file). These features are available for C++, PHP, Python and Ruby (and soon Javascript).

  KDevelop can also be used as a front-end to GDB, thus providing a first-class debugging experience, with breakpoints and inspection of variables and threads. Support for Git and other versioning tools is built-in, so you can commit/push/pull/merge/handle branches from inside the IDE, view diffs, and even have a git-blame-like display in the left margin of the code editor. Finally, KDevelop comes with all the niceties of the Kate text editor, like block-mode selection, code snippets, scripts, the Vi input mode, and syntax highlighting for 240 different programming and markup languages.

  So, this is an impressive list of features that many KDE people know about, but having all of this available on Windows, as Free Software, deserves to be enumerated in its entirety.

  KDevelop QML/JS improvements

  

  On a more personal side, I had time to improve the QML/JS language support plugin of KDevelop 5. Most of the improvements are under the hood, and one even allowed me to drop nearly 15000 lines of QML (Qt5, that the plugin can now use, provides QML module description files for all the Qt4 and Qt5 modules, so no need to ship them anymore). One visible new feature is the font chooser helper widget, that displays a list of all the fonts installed on the system. This way, you don't need to open a rich text editor or any other program that lists fonts in order to find how exactly a font is named.

  KDevelop 5 bug fixes

  Instead of working alone at home, with only sporadic contacts with other people through IRC and e-mails, I can work in a room with many other people. In fact, I'm sitting just at the left of Aleix Pol, and in front of Kevin Funk. Both are busy fixing bugs in KDevelop 5 (that we now use for actual work) so that it becomes solid and stable. The list of bugs fixed is too long to be enumerated, but projects now load correctly, tool-tips work as expected (their behavior had changed with Qt5 and we had to adapt the KDevelop code), and Milian Wolff (who is not in Randa, unfortunately) is optimizing the core of KDevelop for several days.

  Love for api.kde.org

  Sometimes, someone has a question and asks it. It also happens that, in the middle of a meeting concerning KDevelop (or any other project), somebody starts to participate and gives us his or her point of view. It is also very interesting to ask people for help or simply to discuss with them. KDE Edu people are asking KF5 Porting people for advice, and the KDE SDK group held a meeting with the KDE Book group in order to discuss how KDE should be documented.

  This last meeting was especially great because it allowed "hard-coders" (developers of KDevelop are developers targeting other developers) to meet people working on the documentation. We discovered that we have shared interests (all of us want developers to discover that the KDE Frameworks exist, that they are wonderful and can easily be used in Qt applications) and that working on the documentation is easy and rewarding.

  

  For instance, I gave some love to the API documentation of the frameworks. The main page has not yet changed, but each framework now has a nice box that gives information about who is the maintainer of the framework, how to use it using CMake or QMake (yes, KDE Frameworks can be used in QMake projects), what is its mailing list and IRC channel, a Git clone URL, and a link to the freshly-released Inqlude repository of Qt libraries.

  The changes are already partly online, but api.kde.org is regenerated only once a day or so. Some features and bug fixes (like links to lxr.kde.org for each documented class) will therefore appear only tomorrow.

• QML/JS ported to KDevelop 5

  Published on dim 10 août 2014 in Nepomuk, (Comments)

  Usually, I start my blog post with a small text, but today I'll show you a screenshot:

  

  This screenshot shows the QML/JS KDevelop plugin working as usual, highlighting declarations and uses, finding types, and displaying nice tool-tips. The code-completion also works even if it is not visible on the screenshot. What is interesting is the look of KDevelop: do you see the flatter theme? The colors that are a bit different than usual? This difference is appearance comes from the fact that this is not the usual KDevelop, this is KDevelop 5, based on Qt5 and on the shiny new KDE Frameworks 5.

  The KDevelop team has done an amazing job and KDevelop works very well in its KF5 version. In fact, I'm using it right now, on real code. What is new is that the QML/JS plugin now also works on KDevelop5. I'm at the wonderful Randa meeting, and with the help of several KDE developers, I was able to very quickly port the QML/JS plugin to the latest KDevelop. You can find the KF5 version of the plugin in the frameworks branch of kde:kdev-qmljs.

  Now that all the power of Qt5 and the KDE Frameworks 5 is available, new features will be possible. They will mostly concern the helper widgets (that will finally start to be useful, for instance by displaying a font dialog allowing you to choose a font family instead of guessing (or opening LibreOffice to see the list)), but having the plugin based on Qt5 will also enable the recognition of Plasma 5 QML packages installed system-wide. In fact, this support was not possible before because the system-wide path in which those plugins are installed is only known to Qt5, and has to be retrieved using QCoreApplication::libraryPaths. The plugin therefore needs to link against Qt5 in order to use this method.

  Here are some more screenshots, showing the helper widgets ported to QtQuick 2 (and QtQuick.Controls, providing the slider):

  

  

  It is only the beginning of the Randa meeting and many more things are still to come! There are many discussions ongoing, and it is wonderful to meet KDE developers in real life and to talk with them. Exchanging ideas is very easy (it basically consists of shouting a question across the room), and we get the occasion to discuss with people working on very different projects. This is very interesting!

Page 1 / 6 Next »