Simon, our worshippalicous python bindings hacker came by tonight for a bit of hacking (he lives across
the river from here, about 20 minutes by bike on a well OSM-mapped route. I was keen to get the new Python scriptengine Sime has just landed in SVN running so I can play around with Plasmoids written in Python.
The steps to get Python Plasmoids on running on your desktop are (assuming you have KDE from SVN installed): installing python, sip and pyqt into your development environment; building kdebindings, then you can build the plasma scriptengine located in kdebase. There are building instructions on TechBase.
Developing Plasma applets (which is pretty much the only thing you can do with the scriptengine right now, since there aren’t any applets written yet — except for the obligatory clock) is pretty easy from that point. You need to have a .desktop file containing some metadata and you actual script (which can be how ever long you wanted, it lands in contents/code/main.py and other .py’s). How you include graphics and more is well documented on TechBase, so I won’t repeat that here. To see if the scripting engine works, open the Add Applet… dialogue|Install new widget|…from local file. You should then see the scripting engine listed among the other options. In the future, we can make this part a bit nicer, installing and running and applet could be as easy as dropping it on the Plasma canvas and do the necessary security work. ll the needed information is already contained in the package.