bindings: what's the big idea!?
Armelius Cameron
armeliusc at gmail.com
Sun Jan 17 21:36:07 UTC 2010
On Sunday 17 January 2010 15:38:47 Petrus de Calguarium wrote:
> What are bindings?
<snip<
> What do they do? Are they just for software development, or do these
> programs need to be 'bound' to eachother to get the software to function
> with all of it's intended features?
Yes, a lot of these are for software development. For example qt python
binding is useful for python programmer who wants to be able to use QT
libraries for graphical stuff, probably similarly KDE python binding.
QScintilla is a QT port of scintilla editor, so presumably QScintilla-python
binding is a way for accessing the editor function / libraries via python
programming language.
C++ is the predominant/native programming language used for development that
uses QT libraries for graphical stuff (KDE being a specific example). But Python
(in this specific case) is very popular and a lot easier to use too for
something appropriate with its domain. The binding allows a programmer to keep
using Python, for example, keep all the benefits of high-level language, yet
uses a graphical libraries such as QT for user interface and get the same
look-and-feel as the rest of KDE GUI. So maybe think of the bindings libraries
as the glue to connect libraries build with different programming languages to
be accessible among each other. There are other bindings as well, for exampel
GTK Python binding, QT Java binding, etc.
So in sort, you're right that you probably don't need all those binding
libraries unless you're doing software development, and even then, software
development that needs a way to call those different libraries from the native
programming language you use.
I hope that make sense and helps explaining some.
AC
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