Beautiful Architecture

Chapter 12. When the Bazaar Sets Out to Build Cathedrals

How ThreadWeaver and Akonadi were shaped by the KDE community and how they shape it in turn

Till Adam

Mirko Boehm

	Principles and properties		Structures
	Versatility	✓	Module
✓	Conceptual integrity	✓	Dependency
✓	Independently changeable	✓	Process
	Automatic propagation		Data access
✓	Buildability
✓	Growth accommodation
✓	Entropy resistance

Introduction

The KDE project is one of the biggest Free Software^[58] efforts in the world. Over the course of 10 years, its very diverse community of contributors—students, seasoned professionals, hobbyists, companies, government agencies, and others—has produced a vast amount of software addressing a wide variety of issues and tasks, ranging from a complete desktop environment with a web browser, groupware suite, file manager, word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation tools, to highly specialized applications, such as a planetarium tool. The basis of these applications is provided by a collection of shared libraries that are maintained by the project collectively. Beyond their primary intended use by the members of the KDE developer community itself, they are also used by many third-party developers, both commercial and noncommercial, to produce thousands of additional applications and components.

Although the initial focus of the KDE project was to provide an integrated desktop environment for free Unix operating systems, notably GNU/Linux, the scope of KDE has broadened considerably, and much of its ...