The amaroK bindings for Python 0.1.0 review

The amaroK bindings for Python is a fairly complete amaroK remote control class

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Manuel Amador

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The amaroK bindings for Python is a fairly complete amaroK remote control class. It is extremely useful for amaroK scripts and other applications. Basically, you can remote control amaroK by calling methods from an amaroKProxy instance.

In addition, it implements the Observer/Observable pattern so you can deal with events in an object-oriented, loosely coupled fashion. Even better, you can call an amaroKProxy instance's collection.getSong(filename) method to get a Song object, with track, artist, album name, and elegant "Artist - Track name" strings.

Nearly all DCOP functions for communication with amaroK are implemented.

It will use KDE bindings' DCOP module if available, otherwise it will default to the command-line DCOP dcop command, through python-commandsplus. If using KDE bindings, a slave process is spawned, and IPC is used to marshal and unmarshal function calls, so as to not contaminate your application's sys.modules with KDE's Python modules. This all happens automatically in the background.

To use it, you import the module in your script and instantiate an amaroKProxy instance, then call your instance's startMonitoring() method, which will start reading from standard input, monitoring for amaroK's events. You can then sleep(1) until your instance's .isAlive() method returns False (which means amaroK is now gone.

amaroKProxy is an Observable class, and so are its members:

- player
- contextBrowser

This means that you can implement Observer objects or Threads in your amaroK script, and have them be notified of amaroK events, instead of having to read standard input and act accordingly (plus error-prone exceptional condition handling).

Requirements:
Python 2.2 or later
The Python commandsplus module
The Python Observable module

Installation:

python setup.py install # to build and install directly
python setup.py bdist_rpm # to prepare an RPM