Panel Applets (KDE3 Architecture)

Information on this page is applicable to TDE

This page contains archived KDE 3.x content from various sources which is directly applicable to (or has been updated for) the Trinity Desktop Environment.

Panel Applets

The Trinity panel (also known as Kicker) allows small programs, called applets, to be embedded. Currently, for example the clock and the pager are implemented as applets.

Applets can run either in the internally (i.e. in the panel's process space) or externally (i.e. as separate processes). The advantage of the first method is that the memory overhead is not higher than really necessary. On the other hand, an unstable applet can crash the whole panel. This can not happen with an external applet which communicates with the panel via a DCOP connection.

From the programmer's point of view, the difference between internal and external applets is transparent. He implements an applet as a dynamically loadable library and inherits from the KPanelApplet class in the libtdeui library. In order to notify the panel about a new applet, it has to install a .desktop file in the directory share/apps/kicker/applet in the TDE directory hierarchy.

Further information is available in the KPanelApplet documentation.

Initial Author: Bernd Gehrmann