Reference guides and APIs

The reference guides and APIs section of the Developer's Corner is full of reference books. These are meant to look up some information, or to find a brief overview of something (say, the KDE 3 architecture as a whole). This is not the place for tutorials or HOWTO's. Nor is is the place for KDE's standards on UI or application design. We assume you are already familiar with Trolltech's™ excellent Qt 3.3 or Qt 4.0 documentation and their Developer Pages.

Not all applications have their API documented here in the Developer's Corner. Two you might be most interested in are KDevelop and Quanta Plus.

• Library and Application Reference

  An online reference for the APIs in the KDE Libraries and for many applications as well. Covers KDE versions 3.4, 3.5 and SVN trunk, as well as a selection of much older versions. Also contains a single HOWTO on writing API documentation.

Design Documents

• KDE 3 Architecture Overview

  An overview of the KDE 3 architecture, including discussions of common techniques, library classes, and general development issues. This is for KDE 3.0.

• KDE 2 Architecture Overview

  An overview of the KDE 2 architecture, similar to the above. This is for KDE 2.2.

• DCOP

  (Design documents from 1999-2000)

• The design of the K desktop environment

  This is a presentation I gave at the SIMPLINUX conference in Portugal. It discusses the design of KDE and how it has changed through the different releases. You can browse the slides online, or download them in one go. There is also a text only version (only a couple of the slides are really pictures, the rest are fine as text). You can also see some photos of the presentation. (Design documents from 1999 - the website http://simplinux.ci.aaual.ualg.pt/ has disappeared in the meantime.)

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