KDE3 Tutorials

This page contains information relevant to KDE 3.x or older versions.

This page contains archived content from various sources pertaining to KDE 3.x (maybe outdated and/or partly useful) which should probably be updated. Please regard information in this page with extra caution.

Note: Some of these tutorials are only available from the Wayback Machine. Attempts have been made to link to the last viable version, but if the document spanned multiple pages, they may not all have been crawled on that date. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Getting Started

Anatomy of a Simple KDE3 Designer Application: [1] A complete beginners guide to a KDE3 application.

KDE3 programming tutorial using KDevelop: [2] A programming tutorial by Richard Crook.

Qt Designer and KDevelop 3.0 for Beginners (Original Link--now dead): Qt is the toolkit used by the KDE project for developing graphical applications. Currently, translations are available through the original link. This paper, written by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, shows a beginner how to create a simple application using Qt Designer 3 and KDevelop 3. This tutorial is based on an application written by Jono Bacon and has been reviewed by Daniel Molkentin (for the KDevelop 2 version) and Thomas Nagy. Translations to German, Russian, French, Italian, and Romanian available at the original site. Brought to you by KDE-Women.

KDE 3.0 Tutorial: An excellent tutorial by KDE developer Antonio Larrosa Jiménez leading you from nothing to a fairly full featured web browser. Highly recommended for KDE 3.0 developers.

Programming Tutorial for KDE 3

Makefile.am HOWTO: Make the KDE 3 build system work for you. This HOWTO shows you how to do most anything you would need to do to get your application to compile and install

Components and Plugins

KDE User Interface Tutorial (XML GUI): Tutorial by KDE developer Kurt Granroth showing how to convert an existing KDE application to use the new XML based user interface builder.

Creating KParts Components: Tutorial on IBM DeveloperWorks, by David Faure shows developers how to create KParts components, under KDE 2 and KDE 3.

Developing a Plugin Structure for a KDE Application: This tutorial will take you through all the steps needed to write a plugin structure, plus plugins for your KDE application.

Providing file meta-data support with KFile plugins: Tutorial by Brad Hards that describes how to write a meta-data plugin for your favourite file format. It is presented as an example based tutorial.

Embedded Components Tutorial: Tutorial by KDE developer Kurt Granroth showing how to convert an existing KDE application into a component suitable for embedding in Konqueror.

How to write Kontact plugins

KConfig Module HOWTO: A small tutorial about writing a module for the KDE Control Center.

Using the KDE dock widget: Tutorial for creating widgets that dock to other widgets.

Introduction to Get Hot New Stuff: An introduction to the developer-friendly network update system that allows KDE applications to fetch new application data at runtime in a user friendly manner.

File Access with KIO

KIO Tutorial (German version): Tutorial by KDE developers Carsten Pfeiffer and Stephan Kulow for the c't Magazine, giving an introduction into the KDE IO Architecture and an example KIO Slave.

Using IOSlaves: IOSlaves are the subprocesses KDE uses to fetch remote files without blocking the user interface. This document discusses how they work and how to use them. (Somewhat dated, but might still be useful).

Scripting and Application Automation

Creating a DCOP Interface: This tutorial shows you how to create a DCOP interface to a KDE application.

Connect KDE applications using DCOP: IBM DeveloperWorks tutorial, shows how to use kdcop and dcop with several examples such as instantly messaging a contact in kopete when he comes online, and also how to create a simple DCOP-aware application.

Misc.

KWin decoration styles: Tutorial on creating decoration plugins for the KWin window manager (KDE 3.2 and later).

Creating Konqueror Service Menus: This tutorial shows you how to create mimetype-specific actions in Konqueror's context menu (aka "servicemenus").

KMDI Tutorial: Creating a Multi-Document Interface program using the KMDI library and KDevelop.

TDE DBus Tutorial: Automatically generate and use dbus interfaces, publish services.