[Qt-interest] Suggestions for future Qt versions

[Thiago Macieira]

Constantin Makshin wrote:
>Suggestion #1
>-------------
>Currently on *nix platforms Qt can use zlib version present in the
> system ("-system-zlib" configuration option), but on Windows it can't
> because project files don't contain respective settings. Since this is
> not very convenient to use 2 versions of the same library (one is built
> into QtCore library and another is in separate DLL), I decided to
> update Qt project files appropriately.
>
>Diff file made against Qt 4.5.1 sources is attached to this message:
>1) only Visual C++ compiler is supported;
>2) it's assumed that zlib import library has the default name
> "zlib1.lib".

Hello Constantin

Thanks for the contribution. In order to make your patch acceptable, could 
you address these issues:

 1) the name zlib1.lib doesn't match what some of the .pro files had 
commented out (libz.lib). Why? When you get the zlib sources and build 
under the default options, without patching, what do you get?

 2) for the patch to be acceptable, it has to address both msvc and mingw. 
It should do win32-msvc* instead of win32. The mingw case (win32-mingw) 
uses probably -lz (for libz.a), but could you find out?

 3) does the configure.exe accept -system-zlib? If not, it needs to be 
modified (source is in tools/configure) to accept it.

>Suggestion #2
>-------------
>Both Qt and WebKit have their own implementations of XML, SQLite and
> SVG. WebKit's JavaScriptCore module also contains PCRE library, which
> is more or less compatible with Qt's regular expressions. IMHO, such
> functionality duplication is redundant, so I think it'd be nice to
> change QWebKit so it'll use functions provided by Qt (QtXml, QtSql and
> QtSvg modules and QRegExp class).

There's nothing in the QtXml module that WebKit could use. The DOM parser 
and the SAX parser only work for well-formed XML and WebKit has to deal 
with HTML. So WebKit needs its parser anyways.

QtWebKit will offer access to the object tree by the new QWebElement class. 
Please take a look at current blogs by our developers to see what the 
class will look like. The QDom* classes are inspired by DOM, but don't 
follow it to the letter and even add extensions to it. QtWebKit, instead, 
will offer a much cleaner jQuery-inspired API.

QtSvg also can't be used. The implementation found in Qt is that of SVG 
Tiny 1.2 and we have no plans of going any further. The SVG implementation 
found in WebKit has full SVG support. And it accounts for half of WebKit, 
whereas QtSvg is the smallest module in Qt.

Finally, SQLite and PCRE: yes, we'd like to make WebKit share the same 
code as Qt. SQLite is a fairly simple case: if it's available in the 
system, it should be used. We can't use the system PCRE because it doesn't 
support Unicode (last I heard), but we do want to have a more powerful 
regexp engine in Qt. (read: we want, but we don't know how to yet)

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) nokia.com
  Senior Product Manager - Nokia, Qt Software
      Sandakerveien 116, NO-0402 Oslo, Norway
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