[Development] The place of QML

[Girish Ramakrishnan]

Hi Alan,

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:09 PM, Alan Alpert <alan.alpert at nokia.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a little worried that the position of QML in Qt5 is not entirely clear.
> It's a great new technology, but that "new" part means that realistically it
> will not take over everything, everywhere, immediately upon the release of Qt
> 5.0.0. To help place QML within the greater Qt context, I've written the
> following article. You will certainly need to read it if you think that Qt5 is
> pure QML (or pure C++)! It is also highly relevant to the increasing number of
> Qt developers writing QML APIs for their C++ functionality. The things I need
> feedback on are:
> A) We need to establish a consensus on the role of QML within Qt.
> B) Where would such an article go? Labs Blog? Qt 5 Book? Wiki or Doc page?
>

That's a fantastic article. I would like to see these as part of Qt
documentation itself as the soft-introduction to QML.

As for the consensus, this is very much in vibe with what my idea of
QML is. I think we should push QML primarily as a UI technology and
encourage people to keep their data and models in C++. Any non-UI
items created in QML is primarily to aid writing the UI (it's easy to
create data bindings). I advocated something on these lines at dev
days (http://get.qt.nokia.com/videos/DevDays2011/TechnicalSessions/DevDays2011_-_Qt_Quick_Best_Practices_And_Design_Patterns.pdf).

I don't want to hijack the thread, but apart from articles on QML we
also need a big app that remove the notion that QML is a "toy". This
big app should try to implement the "ideal" vision of what QML is. We
need the equivalent of a Qt Creator or a designer for the QML world.
Something that solves a real world problem and not flying images, if
you get my point. I think QtMediaHub will solve this problem if we
(the qmh devs) can get it ready before 5.0 (which is very likely). Do
we know of any other big QML application that the world can see to
appreciate how code looks? (The N9 would have been a good showcase but
afaik that code is not open). The other day, I learnt about, Snow shoe
but I am not sure what state it is - http://snowshoe.qtlabs.org.br/.

The way most people learn a new programming language is by reading
other people's code. If we want people to learn QML and have a
pleasant experience with QML, we need to somehow showcase some good
sized QML apps that will help them write good code from the beginning.

Girish