[Interest] qmlscene install problems (was: Interest, Digest, Vol 82, , Issue 5)

[Roland Hughes]

On 07/17/2018 10:13 AM, Henry Skoglund wrote:
> Hi, I just downloaded Qt Creator's sources and perused the welcome
> plugin, try as I might I couldn't find any usage of qml, instead I found
> lots of widgets like QStackedWidgets, QHBoxLayouts and QVBoxLayouts
> being created by the welcome plugin.
>
> I don't understand how not loading that welcome plugin would help in any
> way with any qml problems?
>
> Rgrds Henry
Hello Henry,

I'm still in writing mode so please allow me a few minutes to write 
something which should prove both informative and entertaining.

During the early 1990s "industry analysts" like Gartner were paid to 
market RAD as the next be-all-end-all IT trend. Microsoft was believed 
to be a large part of the funding behind this fraudulent marketing 
because they were desperately trying to shove weak x86 boxes running 
Windows into the data centers where real computers from IBM and DEC resided.

RAD (Rapid Applications Development)

It was all about desktop based tools, most of which were graphical, 
allowing developers with little skill and absolutely no Waterfall 
documentation or training to crank out these pretty little apps deemed 
"solutions" to business problems. Every one of these tools claimed they 
could then scale to the Enterprise level once the prototype was done and 
proper licenses purchased. Today this multi-billion dollar boondoggle is 
being recycled under the name AGILE.

I was doing an unrelated project for Quaker Oats when they had a RAD 
team just enamored with a product I will call PowerFailure to hide its 
true identity. The team was working on some wowsy system designed to 
impress the board or some such thing. Rumblings and grumblings from 
other parts of the company about this black hole where money was going 
in and nothing coming out forced the group to release a "teaser app." 
This teaser app was a company directory. Basically, similar to what 
Microsoft Outlook already provided. The teaser was rolled out to many if 
not all of the desktops. Where Outlook could start finding the person as 
you were typing, this "teaser app" took many minutes. Honestly, the 
payroll conversion project I was on which ran many months completed and 
the "teaser app" didn't get faster. Maybe they stopped working on it? I 
did hear some time later that the VP/Directory level person who brought 
the product in and the team under them were "allowed to seek 
opportunities elsewhere" about a year or so after my project completed.

When the virus known as QML was unleashed on the world, the "teaser app" 
was the Welcome screen in QtCreator. It had pretty much the exact same 
level of success as the PowerFailure teaser app. Actually, the 
PowerFailure teaser app worked better. On a large number of YABU 
distros, QtCreator wouldn't even load, just crashed. On others it would 
start but had other problems. In the YABU world,

qtcreator -noload Welcome

Got added to the YABU world Qt lore. It was how you got QtCreator to run 
again. Probably a large number of people still using that command line 
to launch QtCreator today. This piece of lore along with the others I 
included in this post.

http://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/information-technology/qtcreator-no-qmlscene-installed/

Have existed in the YABU world for years.

QML and it's "teaser app" have had the same outcome as PowerFailure.

"Allowed to seek opportunities elsewhere."

Most of us in the YABU world didn't know this. We still have all of our 
hard won QtCreator lore squirreled away and most of those thing still 
"fix" problems with it. Why didn't we know it? There was GREAT FANFARE 
when the QML Welcome screen was released. I saw no such fanfare about 
QML being taken into the woods and getting 2 behind the ear.

Because of the mental scarring caused by the Welcome screen in the YABU 
(Yet Another uBUntu) world, any time there is a startup issue, the first 
thing people will try is to not load the Welcome screen. We lived with 
years of this.

Most of the RAD tools have either disappeared or fallen off into small 
OpenSource groups. A few of them managed to get into CRUD (Create Read 
Update Delete) applications for internal ERP systems so you will see 
maintenance gigs from time to time, but you don't see commercial or 
large scale systems being written with these tools today. All of these 
tools knew a dirty little secret.

It's very easy to do CRUD.

All of these "tools" were a 70-80% "solution." Without a plan and 
without much skill, low wage workers could generate entry screens and 
reports in an afternoon . . . provided you don't want anything which 
isn't cookie cutter. Getting a few more percent of your "solution" 
requires an expensive amount of hacking. Usually it is unmaintainable 
hacking because if someone relaunches the generator portion your hacks 
are gone.

During the days of DOS there was a C source code generator trying to 
compete in the RAD world named Pro-C, not to be confused with Oracle 
Pro*C. It was another 80% solution, but, it generated C code for 
database access and reporting. It would also allow you to hook your own 
source files in (in later revs) so you "could" keep some of your hacks 
across generations. Once again though, when the client wanted one little 
thing different which was outside of the generator capability, you paid 
a high price. The "Windows version" simply generated a Windows exe which 
launched a DOS box and ran the DOS application. I did a quick search to 
see if I could still find mention of it and had no luck. It was funded 
by some rich boy in Canada.

Being old means I've seen this movie many time.

Most shops which venture into the QML world are walking down the same 
RAD path of the 1990s. That first 50-70% is really fast to crank out. 
Then you have to throw hardware at the problem (the PowerFailure "teaser 
app") just to get reasonable performance.

http://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/information-technology/raspberry-qt-part-12-qml-blows-big-stinky-chunks/

Then getting that last few percent of the needed solution starts to 
become incredibly expensive and time consuming.
A token few places will go out on a limb writing something core with QML 
and they will be left hanging when the rest of QML is taken out to the 
woods getting 2 behind the year.

When QML was first pitched to the Qt community it was going to be much 
like that Pro-C code generator. You would use this 4GL like language, it 
would go through a MOC like process and generate all of the widget code. 
I assume QML was developed via the AGILE process because that's not what 
came out the end of development.

-- 
Roland Hughes, President
Logikal Solutions
(630)-205-1593

http://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com
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