This week, Bavo De Ridder posted a proposal for a new KDE Application Server architecture. The aim is to offer new backend infrastructure that will provide KDE applications with more elaborate and reusable abstractions of raw data, much like is done with library APIs, but also allowing much greater scalability and maintainability in a distributed environment. Such a feature would be a great plus in enterprise or corporate settings and appears to be slated for KDE 3.0. For the juicy details, see the whitepaper.
ORB talk. There has been more talk about alternative ORBs. Preston Brown posted some information regarding the TAO ORB but there appears to be little enthusiam on switching to this particular ORB. On the other hand, Torben Weis proposed modifying MICO itself by taking out unwanted features, making several other bloat-reducing changes and even devising a new language mapping better suited to KDE needs. Meanwhile, Waldo Bastien posted a nice little HOWTO on upgrading KDE-cvs to MICO 2.2.7.
Hidden feature? Kurt Granroth has hacked and improved the little known .kde.html feature of KDE 1.x. The feature, unadvertised in KDE 1.x and unlikely to be present in similar form in KDE 2.0, allows the user to greatly customize KFM's file display by using a slight superset of the HTML syntax. For an example, see this screenshot -- Kurt's message contains the corresponding .kde-global.html.
Debian packages. As many of you have noticed, the machine hosting Ivan E. Moore's excellent debian packages died a horrible death about two weeks ago also taking the mailing list down with it. For those of you hungry for the updated debs, Ivan is doing his best to get the site back up.
KDE Quickies. Pascal Krahmer announced KDevelop 0.4 which also comes with a newly redesigned homepage. Espen Sand announced a new version of khexedit. Matt Koss gave us an update or two on Motif DND for KDE. Sven Radej has patched KWM to support ART widgets. Lars Knoll gave us this update on charsets and fonts. KDE 1.1.2 is now in week 3 of the release schedule. There have been some grumblings about string translations and the such but otherwise matters appear to be progressing as expected.
