JOLIE Rocks!
ervin | June 28, 2008 | 16:32Sorry to all the males out there, but I won’t be posting pictures of Angelina Jolie… I’ll be talking software here.
So JOLIE is an interpreter for a high level language to interact with services. Services as in service oriented architecture, and yes that includes web services but also much more. And, as you might have noticed, we discussed with the guys working on JOLIE during the Tokamak Mark I and as Danny hinted, I wrote a Qt implementation of SODEP (the protocol used to interact with running instances of JOLIE).
Now you might wonder, what’s the point of all that? Well, it’ll enable KDE, to be a first class citizen in the service oriented world (and seeing the amount of web services out there or the growth of D-Bus usage, that’s an important goal). By “first class citizen”, here I mean making it trivial to interact with those services, today we can interact with them but that still require quite some hand made code, something JOLIE and the facilities we’re planning to add in Plasma will hopefully make obsolete.
That’s mostly post-4.1 material… Except that Fabrizio Montesi one of the humongous JOLIE developers couldn’t wait and wrote some proof of concept code. So I’ll post a few screenshots he made because they’re pretty cool in my opinion. So what he made is a small service named Echoes and driving an amarok instance, and GWT based application providing a gui client to this service. Then users can fight over your playlist. 
We tested it, it’s pretty nice all instances are synchronized. Also, if something is changed directly in Amarok you notice it in Echoes GUI. Now, it becomes really cool because you can embed such service clients in your cellphone:
Or even as a Plasma Widget:
Of course, it’s still all a bit experimental and ad hoc at the moment. Our goal post-4.1 is to make this kind of service client GUIs trivial to write and better integrated in KDE. Services are widespread now, let’s make use of them!
the cellphone control is something very cool, using the bluetooth to change song or something like this… cool
Are there any plan to add a full remote control also for the desktop using the cell phone? Like presentations control, web browsing, emails, etc, but using the cell phone connected with the desktop/notebook…or bu remote. That would be very cool
@xdmx: we’re embedding the Service framework directly into libplasma so that people can write widgets that use Plasma::Service and Plasma::DataEngine for interacting with the system …… and get this SOA integration for free.
aaron, very cool
i love you guys
…and i love jolie too… this and angelina
Wow, this look really promising, especially when having a nice plasma binding.
(I need a time machine to reach KDE 4.2 sooner!
What firefox theme do you use there? I like it
How incredible. Things like this are one of the main reasons I use KDE. Everybody has so much content online (flickr, social networking sites like facebook and myspace, last.fm) and keeping it separate from the desktop frustrates me. I can’t wait to see all the great stuff that’s going to come out of this. My only question (that I think is going to be answered in the negative) is if this will make it easier to somehow get Amarok running on a device like an openmoko or android phone. Not just the means to control an already existing instance of the application on a computer somewhere but more of a standalone kind of thing.
Aaron, i saw a video where kde 4 was running on an openmoko, so i think won’t be impossible to have only amarok
About android, i don’t know