Jesper K. Pedersen - Klaralvdalens Datakonsult

Developing a Plug-In structure for your KDE application

Plugins are a way for an application to load extra functionality at run time. This prevents the application from having dependencies to a bunch of libraries or other application, while still making it possible for people to use these if available. In addition it also makes it possible for third parties to contribute to an application without actually modifying its source code.

Plugins are a well know issue from many applications: A screen saver may have plugins for specific screen savers - say flying toasters. An image manipulation program may have plugins for applying special algorithms or for decoding special file formats. A browser may have plugins for displaying specific content like images, post scripts or music.

In this presentation Jesper Pedersen will go through the steps require to develop a plugin structure for an application. He will illustrate this by extending a simple text editor, with plugin feature. This plugin mechanism will make it possible for the user to extend the editor with for example spelling capabilities. The plugins will be made available from a toolbar.

The presentation requires no previous KDE programming knowledge. Basic C++ knowledge will be required to get the most out of the presentation.

Paper

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