[Interest] Roland Qml

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday, 14 July 2020 04:35:28 PDT Roland Hughes wrote:
> On 7/14/20 5:00 AM, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> >> When QML was first pitched back in the Nokia days, it was supposed to be
> >> a script that ran through a pre-compiler generating the C++ widget code.
> > 
> > No, it wasn't.
> 
> Yes it was. I got that exact pitch. It was supposed to replace the
> problem prone XML based UI files and buggy designer of the day. At that
> time the designer was notorious for corrupting UI files forcing one to
> open them with a different editor to fix. Having a plain text "language"
> that was easy to code and would pre-compile to widget code was a great
> selling point.

Again, no, it wasn't. I was there. I was the product manager in question.

You're confusing the QtDeclarative library and QML with the previous attempt 
called WidgetsNG (which in turn was a re-iteration of a previous effort called 
ItemViewNG). WidgetsNG was based on QGraphicsView and its stated intent was to 
bring proper widgets onto QGraphicsView, with support for animations and 
transformations. It had an XML language that, like with uic, would compile to 
C++ at build time.

QtDeclarative never had compilation to C++. I don't remember if the file 
format was XML back then or whether it was already JS based, but by the time 
the Oslo team was involved in the effort the whole thing was processed at 
runtime. This was before anything was sent outside of Nokia.

> That's what the Nokia developers were talking about in the Chicago area.
> They were going to get rid of XML, giving us something that looks much
> like QML, having no logic capabilities, just screen layout, that would
> be 100% compiled.
> 
> What we got was an interpreted language massive security risk.

I don't know who you were talking to. There were no Qt development offices in 
the Chicago area. Either you were talking to sales people or you were talking 
to Nokia developers who had nothing to do with Qt. 

It might have been a customer-meeting trip where product managers (like me 
back then) would have been present to gather customer input, but not with the 
actual developers. Trips from Australia are mighty expensive. If that was the 
case, then nothing was sent in stone. It might even have been WidgetsNG time, 
which was presented in one session at one Qt Developer Days I think.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products