[Development] The place of QML

[Uwe Rathmann]

On 05/15/2012 02:13 AM, Donald Carr wrote:
> QML will be useful for anyone who wants to have designers
> get proactively involved in the UI/system software development of user
> interfaces for any number of embedded/dedicated devices. Once the
> qmlscene application can run, you can start working directly on the UI
> for the final product.

While I understand the intention I still don't believe, that designers 
will be able to implement the complete UI and software engineers can 
focus on the rest. Instead I expect a cutting line somewhere in the 
middle of the UI code.

My experience is that about 80% of a GUI ( of a large project ) are 
trivial and can be done by organizing standard Qt widgets in layouts. 
But about 20% of the use cases ( making more than 50 % of the time you 
spend on developing a GUI ) are necessary for tweaking the widgets for 
some specific behaviour - or look and feel. A C++ framework has always 
been a very powerful way to face these requirements. Hope QML doesn't 
let us pay more for the last 20% than what we might have won in the 
other 80%.

As freelancer I have been part of many commercial Qt projects over the 
last 14 years. Please let me add a - maybe surprising - note: none of 
them ( really none ! ) used the designer to implement the UI - 100% of 
the development teams decided to use plain C++.

Uwe