Freeing the Web from the Browser

Most of the user's interaction with the Internet, or rather "The Web" is currently going through the web browser. As a development platform, this appears to be rather limiting. The diversity of input devices, needs for caching and offline usage are all problems which are not consistently solved for most applications.

Deep integration of data from the web while using local UIs provide one way of getting around such limitation. The KDE team is working towards deep integration of online data and web services into applications and the primary UI of the device. This allows for streamlined user experience combined with merits, modern web applications offer the user.

In this presentation, Sebastian demonstrates and explains some of the technologies used in Akonadi, Plasma and Qt that integrate user's data such as email, contacts and bookmarks as well as the Social Web and other web services deeply into the desktop, taking advantage of locally available infrastructure on the client device. Akonadi is a local cache and one-stop-shop for applications that want to integrate PIM data. Plasma is the primary user interface of the KDE desktop, but also a library to build canvas-based user interfaces for wide range of devices, from mobile to media centers.

Qt itself offers numerous techniques that allow asynchronous fetching of data, XML parsing, XSLT transformation of XML data sets. Qt's webkit integration makes it easy to directly integrate content from the web into the applications, or give applications this "webby" feeling.