[Development] Virtual GUI framework

[David Boddie]

On Thu Nov 7 15:22:31 CET 2013, Rand McRanderson wrote:

> Since Qt is a cross-platform GUI library, would it be possible to
> create a fake display system platform that would essentially stub out
> all of the display library dependencies. Ideally, this would still
> capture information about what is being draw, so that you could
> calculate what would be displayed hypothetically (this could be
> helpful for things such as generating pdf files based on calculated
> layout). At the very least this might provide a way for Qt to run a
> console application without bringing in libraries that may not be
> available for all environments (the key case here is Linux servers
> with display libraries disabled, Windows I'm not sure you can really
> disable display libraries, but I know that the Linux use-case comes up
> decently with servers).

The minimal case can be done with QPA, as Friedemann mentioned in his
reply. For my use case, I build minimal Qt libraries with only the
features I need and use a dummy screen plugin to keep everything happy.
The resulting library appears to run fine on servers without displays.

I'll try to put the code up somewhere tomorrow.

David