The initial motivation of Kommander evolved out of the need for an easy way to allow end users to extend the capabilities of Quanta. Project Manager of Quanta Eric Laffoon had at that time successfully used Kaptain, the mother program of Kommander, to create graphical interfaces to Quanta that performed PHP code encapsulation and provided customization/editing facilities. Kaptain was perfectly suited to the task, but for these things -
| You had to write a grammar to describe the dialogs |
| It didn't make use of KDE's extensions and capabilities |
| You couldn't easily extend the widgets available for users |
| We wanted a much more automated creation environment |
| We wanted to provide other developers the ability to easily integrate the system |
We decided these things were of enough importance to warrant the development of our own system. Luckily a lot of the work was already done for us thanks to Trolltech.