qreator-discuss team mailing list archive

[David Planella <david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

During the ramp up to the announcement of Ubuntu on mobile devices on
the 2nd of January and yesterday's announcement of the source code being
published in 6 days, I've been thinking more about the future of Qreator.

I'd like Qreator to become the application everyone uses to create codes
on Ubuntu -eventually to scan them, but that's a separate story. And
with that I mean on all devices and form factors Ubuntu will soon run
on. I firmly believe that to achieve that goal the Ubuntu SDK is the
only way to go. In practical terms that is migrating to QML.

QML has impressed me very much. I was skeptical on what one could do
with a declarative language, and in my experience was: a lot. I was
expecting I'd have to resort to C++ at some point, which I really wanted
to avoid (I'm done with compiling, let alone cross-compiling), and I was
very surprised to find out how naturally small JavaScript snippets fit
into QML where some more complex logic is needed.

I also looked at PySide. Python is, and will continue to be, my
favourite programming language, and I had dearly wanted to keep using it
for Qreator. However, after having been on the #pyside channel for a
while and having been reading the mailing list archives, I concluded
that the project is dead. It has not yet migrated to Qt 5 (which means
it does not work with the Ubuntu SDK), and there is no initiative for a
roadmap at all. The current discussions seem to be about rewriting the
bindings generator, as it's perceived to be a major barrier for getting
new contributors to the project.

All in all, with the purpose of learning about the Ubuntu SDK and
evaluating it for Qreator, I created a proof-of-concept version of
Qreator using QML and the Ubuntu SDK [1].

Once checked out, provided that the SDK is installed [2], it can simply
be executed on an Ubuntu desktop by running: `qmlscene main.qml`

Caveats:
- The app's header is a workaround until the SDK itself implements it.
  That code will be removed at some point soon.
- The WiFi page is just a proof-of-concept, it currently only changes
  the code according to the text, it's not a valid WiFi wireless code
- System integration is not quite there yet, so until there are Qt
  bindings for the main Ubuntu and GObject APIs, we'll have to think
  about workarounds or thin wrappers to talk to those APIs.

Thoughts?

Cheers,
David.

[1] https://code.launchpad.net/~dpm/qreator/qreator-qml
[2] http://developer.ubuntu.com/get-started/gomobile

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