[Interest] Building a large desktop application with QML/QtQuick?

[Scott Aron Bloom]

My biggest problem/concern with the QML style of application development is QA.

Its too easy, to put in a syntactically correct, but symantically wrong construct in.  Which would compile (assuming you are using a pre-compiler for it) and run.. but not work, and be very difficult to track down because it “looks correct”.

This has been a problem for all non-“real” language algorithm development systems since day one.

if you have full unit test coverage, it will cover you….

But I trust

object->setColor( Qt::red ) a lot more than “object : colour red” ..

Btw, that css’ish is an actual bug I had found in a Qml based project….  Damn british developers

Scott

From: interest-bounces+scott=towel42.com at qt-project.org [mailto:interest-bounces+scott=towel42.com at qt-project.org] On Behalf Of Russell Warren
Sent: Friday, June 19, 2015 12:01 PM
To: interest at qt-project.org
Subject: [Interest] Building a large desktop application with QML/QtQuick?


I'm contemplating making a large/monolothic/modular desktop application with QML/QtQuick.  The application would be a client-side application for a back-end server with a lot of data.  There will be a wide variety of interfaces to manage, including: many forms for creating/modifying various server-side objects; a large number of table/treeview displays for exploring data, and many varieties of interactive graphs/charts.  Data viewing must scale up to millions of data points of diverse types... ListView, TableView, and the new TreeView controls would definitely be heavily used.  It is also worth saying that the control count/density would be pretty high. Portions of the application would be like an IDE, or like Excel (but JMP [1] is a better example).

Starting proof of concepts with QML look really promising.  In particular, the GUI design/layout model is so enjoyable that reverting back to Qt Widgets development feels clunky and old (I hate to say that... I love Qt Widgets!).  QML works very nicely.  Binding on its own is awesome.

However, before a more significant investment into the QtQuick path, I figured it was worth asking a few questions on this list:

  1.  Can anyone think of any fundamental reason to NOT do the interface with QML? ie: Any compelling reasons that we should stick with old-school Qt Widgets?
  2.  Does anyone know of any existing examples of large applications built with QtQuick?
  3.  Does anyone know of any good resources on structuring large QtQuick applications?
For the last question, this document is a great start:

https://wiki.qt.io/QML_Application_Structuring_Approaches

I'm looking for further ideas or examples.  Especially ones that include thoughts on organizing large numbers of custom qml components into modules/hirerarchies to keep coding somewhat sane.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Russ

[1] http://www.jmp.com/en_us/software/jmp.html


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/attachments/20150619/ddb263a5/attachment.html>