KTp/Components/Chat Window
This page is about planning and design of Telepathy's Chat Window
About Kopete's Chat Window
Why not straight porting Kopete's window?
Kopete's Chat window is overly complex and deeply integrated with Kopete's internals, hence it is quite impossible to do a full porting without losing time and mental sanity. However, there are some things we can learn and even pick from Kopete.
Mistakes which we should not repeat
- I'm all for modularity, but having a KPart for each component statically referenced in the core is possibly something we don't want to repeat
- Think about the future: try having an higer level of abstraction and avoid using custom widgets wherever possible
What we can pull
KHTML code looks quite fine, and theme support as well. Also, some bits here and there could be definitely ported over.
About our new chat window
Webkit vs. KHTML
The eternal fight. To avoid reinventing the wheel, I'd love to use Kopete's already written KHTMLPart based message window. At the moment, KWebkitPart is not stable, for this reason KHTML will still be used, but I'd surely have a look at webkit as soon as it gets ready for prime time.
Components modularity and integration
In my view, we would have a chat window almost identical to KMess' one: a single (tabbed) window, with a contact list, input+actions field and message view for each tab. KXMLGui can really come handy here, but I'd like to avoid using KParts as it really does not make a lot of sense to me, when we can simply use a set of widgets.
Interface
What comes to my mind is that the use case of such a window is similar to rekonq or chrome. Hence, the principle of ditching the menu bar could be appliable here as well (P.S.: the official MSN client already does this, IIRC).