JOLIE Rocks!
Sorry to all the males out there, but I won't be posting pictures
of [Angelina Jolie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelina_Jolie)...
I'll be talking software here.
So [JOLIE](http://jolie.sourceforge.net) 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](http://ervin.ipsquad.net/2008/04/16/survived-to-a-tokamak-mark-i/)
and as Danny hinted,
[I wrote a Qt implementation of SODEP](http://commit-digest.org/issues/2008-05-11/)
(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!