KWayland Server Component Coming For KDE Plasma 5.2

KWayland was introduced last month with the KDE Plasma 5.1 release but it lacked the server-side code. With the upcoming release of Plasma 5.2, that will change with the server component to KWayland having been merged.

Martin Gräßlin, KDE's KWin maintainer who committed this code, explained the KWayland Server work via a new blog post:

Like the client library the server library is a very low-level Qt wrapper for the Wayland server library. So the main task is to be a Facade to wrap the C library in a for us easier to use Qt style API. E.g. it’s emitting signals when the C callbacks are invoked and hides all the required C casts of void pointers. Nevertheless we still have access to all the wraped Wayland members, so it allows to easily combine KWayland::Server with wayland server code.

KWayland::Server is not a wayland compositor. It is deliberately designed to be head-less, which makes it a wonderful solution for using as a backend for automated tests. E.g. for kscreen it is used to simulate changes in the screen setup which is a huge improvement over the state we have on X11 where there is basically no chance at all to test screen changes.

The KWayland::Server work also includes test applications and a basic Wayland compositor for testing, but doesn't yet support Weston's test applications yet due to not supporting the XDG-Shell protocol until it has been stabilized.