Introduction
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Introduction

Eric Laffoon

Kommander is a visual dialog building tool which can be used to create full mainwindow applications, provided the window is initially created in Qt Designer or from a template in Kommander. The primary objective is to create as much functionality as possible with the absolute minimum use of scripting. This is provided by the following features:

Note

Please note this document includes legacy documentation for compatibility reasons. In a nutshell Kommander offers extremely rapid development and extensive abilities and capabilities. Following is a new list, followed by the legacy content.

Look for documentation on tips and tricks like how to make Kommander fake programming techniques like including a file, creating and using custom widgets, making collapsable panels in windows and other unexpected tricks. Below is our legacy list.

The central key feature of Kommander dialogs is that you can bind text (Kommander Text) to a widget. So if you have @widget1 and @widget2 and they are line edits you can set Kommander to show their contents by entering @widgetText in their Kommander Text area. Then enter hello in @widget1 and world in @widget2. A button can have the string My first @widget1 @widget2 program in Kommander If you run this dialog from a console it will output My first hello world program in Kommander

Hopefully you begin to see a small glimmering of the potential. Kommander enables a much faster design model for simple applications because if allows you to stop thinking so much about language and revert to the more basic and natural conceptual model. In computers language is a means to define concepts and as such it is a layer between concept and implementation that can impede progress with minutia. Kommander seeks to minimize that layer.

Kommander also seeks to build on standards. It is built on the Qt™ Designer framework and creates *.ui files which it renames to *.kmdr. It can easily import any KDE widget and this can be done without having to rebuild Kommander, by using plugins.

Kommander's other significant factor is how it addresses the requirements of language. Computer languages can be wonderful things but they tend to have their own dogmas and zealots often seeking to provide an advance to GUI design in an integrated development environment. Ironically the acceptance of such IDEs is limited by the number of people willing to adopt a new new language to gain access to a desired feature. It is really not reasonable to expect people to need to change over to a dozen languages to access various feature sets. By being language neutral and allowing a Kommander dialog to be extended by using any scripting language Kommander positions itself in a unique position for wide spread adoption. Multiple script languages can be used in a single dialog and applications can be taken over by people using a different language than the original developer and gradually converting and extending it. New widgets and features can be instantly leveraged by all available languages.

We hope that Kommander begins to get the developer support and recognition required to achieve the potential it offers. Our end goal is to make Kommander useful for novice users to extend and merge their applications. At the same time it should become a good prototyping tool. Also it opens the door to the promise of open source in a new way. We know that people can extend our GPL'd programs, but the fact remains very few have the skills. With Kommander those numbers see a huge multiplier! Some applications may be most logical as a Kommander application. We already use it in areas we want to allow extensibility in Quanta Plus.

We hope you enjoy Kommander. Please help us with bug reports and example dialogs, as well as any requests you may have. You can join our user list for help developing Kommander applications.

Best Regards from the Kommander development team!

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