Version 5 of KDE Frameworks is nearing completion
Virtuoso Layering
© Lead Image © Egor Arkhipov, 123RF.com
For the past three years, 20 developers have been working on a revamped version of the KDE libraries. The alpha release appeared in February 2014 with many new features.
The KDE libraries combine functions and tasks that are necessary for KDE applications. For example, KArchive takes care of packing and unpacking archives, and the Solid library provides information about the hardware, such as battery and network status. These libraries developed organically and grew over time. As a result, KDE libraries have many mutual dependencies, as well as dependencies with other libraries.
These dependencies lead to considerable overhead: A programmer who only wants to use a single function must include multiple libraries. The KDE project also provides all the libraries in a massive package; users have always had to install Kdelibs. Additionally, the libraries are tailored to traditional desktop applications, which makes it difficult to use them for mobile devices. The situation has not changed much to this day, except that the libraries have a new name: KDE Platform 4 [1].
At the Platform 11 developer meeting in Randa, Switzerland (Figure 1), some KDE programmers, weary of the problems with KDE's library collection, worked out a plan for the next version of the KDE libraries. This plan kicked off almost three years of development work [2].
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