ISV/Why use KDE (fr)

ISV/Why use KDE

Cette page a pour but d'aider les Fournisseurs Indépendants de Logiciels (ISVs) à appréhender les sujets relatifs à KDE. Ceci inclut les sociétés developpant des logiciels commercials aussi bien que des projets Open Source.

la Communauté KDE

Le projet KDE attire de nombreuses personnes avec des profils différents. De fait, la grandissante communauté KDE inclut de nombreux développeurs, traducteurs, artistes aussi bien que des experts en accessibilité et ergonomie et, bien entendu, beaucoup d'utilisateurs. Pendant plusieurs années maintenant, toute ces personnes plaisent à ce rencontrer à la conférence annuel de KDE aKademy pour discuter des sujets lié à KDE et mettre en place la "roadmap" pour les développements futures.

KDE e.V.

The non-profit organization KDE e.V. helps in creating and distributing KDE by securing cash, hardware, and other donations, then using donations to aid KDE development and promotion. All its members are part of the KDE community which means the KDE e.V. plays an important role in the KDE project. Members of the KDE e.V. form several working groups like the Marketing Working Group (MWG) and the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Working Group to help realize KDE's vision.

Adoption de KDE

KDE est un des plusgros projet Open Source du bureau Linux/UNIX une expérience beaucoup plus conviviale. Par conséquent, des distributions encourage fermement KDE en prenant activement part dans son développement et en faisant de KDE leur environnement de bureau par défaut. De nombreuses sociétés utilisent KDE au quotidien.

Development

The KDE development process takes place in steady release cycles. Release schedules and feature plans help the KDE project coordinating a KDE release by introducing several phases like feature freeze and message freeze. This phases make sure that developers concentrate on polishing the release and the translation teams have time enough to translate all the KDE software into many different languages. Further information about KDE development tools can be found on the development pages.

Documentation

The KDE project provides excellent documentation about its API and its technologies, such as KParts or KXmlGui. There are many Tutorials and HOWTOs which help getting into KDE development. An overview can be found at the development pages.

Technologies

KDE provides a wide range of powerful technologies such as KHTML and KJS which are adopted by other companies like Apple (Safari browsers) and Nokia. Additionally there are several development frameworks like KParts (KDE's component technology), KIO (network/protocol architecture) or KXmlGui (build GUIs based on XML definitions).

KDE uses well-known standards like DCOP in KDE 3 or HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and D-Bus (interprocess communication) in upcoming KDE 4.

Compatibility & Integration

The last major KDE release was KDE 3. All KDE 3.x versions are binary compatible, i.e. software written five years ago is compatible to the latest stable release KDE 3.5. As KDE is based on standards it is for instance easy to integrate applications with plain .desktop files.

Freedesktop.org & Portland

As an ISV, your target is probably not only KDE but all Linux/UNIX desktops. This is made possible due to strong collaboration between KDE and other projects like freedesktop.org which defines standards and software that helps integrating applications in all standard conform desktop environments.

One of those projects is the Portland project, which intends to develop a common set of Linux Desktop Programming Interfaces and Tools to allow applications to easily integrate with the free desktop configuration an end user has chosen to work with.

Sub-Projects

KDE has many sub-projects to more specifically coordinate unique project goals of major supporting applications. Several of these significant projects are noted below:

KDE Pim: The goal of KDE Pim (Personal information management) is to provide an application suite to manage personal information. This includes applications like an email client, a calender etc. The main result is KDE Kontact, our personal information manager.

KOffice: KOffice is an integrated office suite using KDE-technology and features a full set of applications which work together seamlessly to provide the best user experience possible. The office suite contains applications like KWord, KSpread, KPresenter, Krita and many more.

KDevelop: KDevelop is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for KDE. It supports language like C/C++ and Java and helps with rapid application development.

Licensing

An often arising question is: Can I use KDE to develop commercial applications? - Yes, you can develop commercial applications for KDE. KDE's foundation libraries kdelibs and kdepimlibs but also KOffice libraries and several of its major apps are licensed under the LGPL, which means you can link closed source applications against those libraries. A valid Qt developer license is required for closed source development, however.

Roadmap

KDE development follows a release schedule in order to coordinate releases. These usually cover for minor releases the last 10 weeks and for major releases the last 20 weeks before the official release. The features planned for a release are usually published at the same time as the schedule.

Further details can be found in the roadmap page.