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On Sat 18 May 2013 18:41:34 BST, Kevin Krammer wrote:
On Friday, 2013-05-17, Stuart Langridge wrote:It is somewhere in between impossible and very nearly impossible to write a book reader in pure QML for Ubuntu Touch right now, sadly.Well, QtQuick (assuming you wanted to refer to that UI framework when you wrote QML) is a UI framework, not a data processing or application framework. Those pieces are supplied by C++ code just like QtQuick itself being implemented in C++.
Speaking purely for myself here, I don't agree with this. I know that a lot of experienced long-time Qt programmers think that apps should be written in C++ with Qt Quick solely as a presentation layer, but I personally believe that the more it can be possible to write apps using QML and JavaScript alone, with no compilation step or C++ requires, the more it becomes possible to engage developers in building for the platform. I certainly acknowledge that that's not entirely possible right now, that there will always be a space for C++ plugins, and that the platform should probably not grow to encompass all things! However, I'd like to see Qt Quick, and the Ubuntu SDK, extend more capability than it currently does to JavaScript programmers. The web is working out the same way: using HTML and JavaScript as a presentation layer only certainly works, but more and more capability is extended to programmers in those environments without having to fall back on a more "capable" environment server-side. Qt Quick apps have the distinct advantage of being native and therefore having access to some native capability. Taking the example of Monocle that I mentioned, it's entirely possible to write an ebook reader in pure client-side JavaScript in modern browsers right now. I'd love to be able to work like that with Qt Quick; what's preventing that is not a large technical chasm between the two, but a few trivial items such as QML's XMLHttpRequest not supporting some of the XMLHttpRequest v2 API that deals with binary data. As Kevin says here, one way to do this is to put most of the logic of an ebook app in C++ and compile for each platform, and that's indeed what I suggested in my original mail... but I'd love to see the final few tweaks happen to allow an app such as an ebook reader to be writeable without compiling anything, in the same way that a good proportion of the already existing Ubuntu Touch apps are also pure Qt Quick.
sil
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