Konqueror Now Supports Opensearch Too

I just merged my branch of Konqueror searchbar plugin that supports Opensearch [1] mainly to replace my own implementation of search suggestion. Opensearch has an xml formatted open search description, that may contain search url and suggestion service url. To parse the xml, I borrowed Arora’s open search xml parser and writer, written by Jakub Wieczorek.

The suggestions list from the searchbar still looks the same:

The searchbar also supports opensearch autodiscovery [2], meaning that if you find a site that provides a search implementation, you can easily add that new search provider to the searchbar. Additionally, you can set a new shortcut for that newly defined search provider, so that you can use that webshortcut inside the normal konqueror location bar or anything that supports webshortcut.

Here are two screenshots of the searchbar detecting an opensearch autodiscovery link element and the searchbar asking for a webshortcut for the newly added searchbar:

Why do I need to bother to add autodiscovery feature that is rarely used by user? Well, I also don’t know, maybe just to make it comparable to other browsers like FF or arora or IE8 :p

[1].http://www.opensearch.org/Home
[2].http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Autodiscovery_in_HTML.2FXHTML

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Hello World and A Little Feature for Konqueror

My blog has been syndicated in planet KDE for quite a long time. But I haven’t really write a blog (again). Well, I think this might be a good time to start it again. First of all, I need to introduce myself, I was one of KDE Google SoC students in 2007 and 2008. I was working for KOffice for both of the Google SoCs.

But this time I won’t talk about KOffice, but instead about Konqueror. Few weeks ago I implemented a Google suggestion feature for Konqueror searchbar (because I miss that feature from FF – and also inspired by this and this). It was quite a simple patch, and it only worked for Google suggestion API. After submitting the patch to kfm-devel list, Germain Garand (the KHTML guru) suggested that I need to make this improvement more generic, meaning that it should be able to use other search suggestion engines apart from Google. I have finished the improvement about two months ago, but because of the freeze I couldn’t commit it. But since trunk is open again for KDE 4.4, I just committed this improvement to the searchbar plugin source code in KDE extragear.

Mandatory screenshot:

Currently it only supports Google (with parser from Ariya Hidayat – thanks Ariya!) , but I’m working on Yahoo suggestion engine. Other suggestion engines can be added easily as well (Bing anyone? – If it has any :p).

Also, still on my TODO list: A checkbox to enable/disable this feature.

Edit: I just found out there is something called OpenSearch. Seems that this can be used to create even more general engine without any need to write code for any provider specific parser. I’ll look into that tomorrow.

Edit 2: Bing also has suggestion API! (Not that I’m fan of Bing :p I’m still a google fan)

GSoC 2007 Accepted (Part 2)

Ok, continue blogging today after few busy days. For my GSoC 2007 project, my assigned KDE mentor is Tomas Mecir. He is a KSpread developer, not a KWord developer. But this should not be a problem, since he also knows well the basic structure of KOffice. For KWord specific things, I may need to ask other developers (apart from reading the API and source code of course). Also whenever possible, I will need to make sure the tools are also useful for other KOffice applications (in my mind the closest candidate of sharing those tools is KPresenter). For the development environment of KDE4 (kdelibs4) and KOffice2, I already have them in my Debian box (an old Athlon XP-2200+), from KDE anonymous SVN of course. Few days ago, I just purchased a laptop (an Acer one, quite cheap), and I still need to set up the Linux (Debian – my distribution of choice) and of course I need to se up the KDE4 + KOffice2 development environment again. I’ll write about the laptop again tomorrow, or whenever I have free time 😉
Btw, thanks to Darmawan who posted the 1st comment on my 1st blog, congratulations to you too. Nice to see other Indonesian in GSoC 2007, also nice that he is from a university in my hometown (Bandung), I will be going back to Bandung around end of June. (I saw the information from GSoC 2007 student profiles).

GSoC 2007 Accepted (Part 1)

Finally I’m accepted for this year Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2007). For this year, the student application started on 14th March (together with announcement of accepted mentoring application) and ended on 26th March 2007. I only submitted one proposal, Text-tool plugins for KOffice apps. Actually I wanted to write another proposal, but I didn’t have enough time to write that (I already spent few days to see actual KOffice source code + reading some previous student proposals from 2005 and 2006). Why did I choose the Text-tool plugins project (this is from the list of KDE SoC ideas)?

• I want something related to KWord / KPresenter. This project (as I stated in the proposal) will mainly benefit KWord, but it’s not limited to KWord only, because of the modular design of KOffice2. Now KWord is being developed at a very fast pace (by KWord guru Thomas Zander)
• I want to implement basic things that are needed for a word processor, the tools that I’m going to implement are essentials for a word processor.
• I don’t want to work on something that is too complex for me to finish during summer (I’ve had already enough headache with my internship project), I want this to be a fun project during summer.

I asked Thomas Zander to review it before submitting it and luckily he was willing to read it (thanks Thomas :). I submitted the proposal quite early (around 18-19 March IIRC).
The announcement day was 12 April 2007, 5 pm Pacific Time, or around 13 April 8 am Singapore Time (Thursday). I had been checking the google soc page since Wednesday, and Wednesday night to Thursday morning I hardly slept, I woke up few times and checked the internet again and again, but nothing there. Then I went to my internship office, hoping that at the time I arrived (8 am) an email from google already sent to my mail. But unfortunately it was not the case, after checking up the SoC discussion, I knew that it was delayed for few hours. Suddenly someone posted to the groups, that he got application status changed to not accepted. Curious, I also checked mine, and found that the status was not accepted. I almost got heart attack, but few minutes later few people replied that the status was temporary, all were not accepted at that time. I read a really funny comment from one of the students:

On a related note, a huge number of Summer of Code result-awaiting nerds just suffered a collective heart attack

LOL, I’m one of them 😉 Fortunately, few minutes (or few hours later), I read a post stating that the result for some organizations had been released, and after checking KDE page, my application is there! And also the status had changed to application accepted! That day I was also sick, maybe because I didn’t sleep well during the night, but still I was full of happiness!

Thank God for all the blessing!