Development/Architecture/KDE4/Solid (es)

Interacción hardware sin fisuras

Con Solid, Los desarrolladores de KDE son capaces de escribir facilmente aplicaciones que interaccionan con caracteristicas del hardware. La abstracción necesaria para soportar el desarrollo de aplicaciones multiplataforma es proporcionada por la clara y comprensiva API de Solid.

Solid no tiene como objetivo el control de los dispositivos (no te permite sincronizar tu teléfono movil con tu libreta de direcciones local): Solid *busca* dispositivos y te proporciona acceso a la información de estos. De esta manera, puedes mirar facilmente las funciones de la cpu, o el controlador que maneja tu cámara, o el punto de montaje de tu lapiz usb. En suma: te da la posibilidad de "ver sin tocar" tus dispositivos.

Ahora te preguntas(al menos, yo me pregunté): "Por que debería necesitar esta biblioteca?" Quiero controlar el hardware disponible, no mirarlo solamente!"

Bien , Solid

Well, Solid helps you a lot again: for any device interface, it gives you enough information to easily access it using other libraries or stacks. This way, if you want to manage your camera, you can use Solid to recognize it (you can use Solid::Notifier that will let you know when your camera has been plugged in), and then you can ask Solid to give you the information you need to handle it, for example with GPhoto or any other library you can think of. The same applies for any other plugged device: DVB cards (once recognized, Solid gives you the name of the associated device), audio cards (you can use ALSA, OSS or whatever you want: Solid knows the data to access it), portable media players, network cards, et cetera. Moreover, it lets you check if you're connected to any network or not, and you can use Solid to tell the system to connect (that is, you can ask Solid: "Give me access to the network, I don't want to care about details").

Anyway, some other things needs to be said about network devices and Bluetooth. For these two classes of devices, Solid provides the "Control" namespace: that is, it lets you control them directly, without using external libraries. This means that with Solid, you can even handle your wireless or wired network interfaces, associate them to an essid, and choose ip configuration for them. You can even access your phone through Bluetooth, and so on.

The "listing" part of Solid resides in kdelibs, while the Control namespace is in kdebase.