I got some Ruby Plasma bindings working a while ago. They wrapped the complete C++ api and allowed you to write a Plasma KDE plugin entirely in Ruby, which just looked like an ordinary C++ plugin to the Plasma runtime. However, that isn't the preferred way to implement non-C++ language support in Plasma.

I've been playing with using KIO::get() to make queries on the DBPedia SPARQL endpoint, parse the XML result set and convert it to be used by a Plasma Data Engine. I'll explain how it works as I think it is pretty useful and makes it very easy to link up applets with Semantic Web/Desktop data.

It sounds as though exciting things are happening at the Milan Tokamak Plasma sprint, with an api review and the Widgets on Canvas changes happening at the moment. Meanwhile, I've been having my own 'mini-sprint' this last week in Gran Canaria. I've ported the digital clock as well as the analog one, along with the web applet, plasmoid viewer and data engine browsers apps, and the time data engine to Ruby.

I've added bindings to the KDE 4.1 trunk for using Soprano with Ruby. It allows you to add and remove statements from the Soprano RDF database and to make SPARQL queries over D-Bus. Also included is an optional adaptor to use ActiveRDF with Soprano.

With the great intro provided about Plasma Packages to get Apple's Dashboard Widgets running, it follows a screenshot that shows SuperKaramba - yes, it works with legacy *.skz files.

btw, SuperKaramba example that uses KHTML to display content

Kross, the scripting framework, is one of the pillars new with KDE4. While the project started already a while back in 2004 it enveloped over the time to a rather big codebase. During the KDE4-process one of the main-goals was to decrease the codebase what can be even more difficult then writting new code.

Last night I was discussing how to load KParts in Korundum with CapitalT on the #kde-ruby IRC channel. It took me a bit of googling to work out what to do, and I eventually realised I'd left the KDE::PluginLoader class out of the Smoke library that the KDE4 version of Korundum uses.

I'm quite excited by the things that the Semantic web will make possible, and one very interesting project is DBpedia, which aims to extract structured data from Wikipedia, link it with other datasets and put everything in an RDF triple store that you can either download or query via a 'SPARQL endpoint' on the web. I've been trying out using ActiveRDF to make DBpedia queries and showing the results in a Korundum KDE4 app.

SuperKaramba as Plasma Applet running 4 instances of the Aero AIO theme.

Screenshot;