[Qt-interest] About Plugin Architecture in QT

[Manuel Fiorelli]

2009/4/29 David Boddie <david.boddie at nokia.com>:
> Reading this, I am reminded of GCF:
>
> http://www.vcreatelogic.com/oss/gcf/index.html
>
> I don't know if it corresponds closely to what you are looking for, but
> you might find it interesting, anyway.

In my opinion QPlugin is a wonderful tool for "simple tasks" such as
support arbitrary codec, DB drivers, etc..., but it is too low level
if we want to develop an extensible application like Eclipse.

I know that Qt-Creator is based on plugins, like Eclipse, so I suppose
that Qt Creator uses a plugin architecture developed internally by Qt
Software.

Is there any chance that Qt will provide native support for such an
architecture?

Binary compatibility in C++ is an hard matter (even if Qt has a really
clean policy about it), thus the architecture should support also the
notion of source component, that is to say a package which may be
built on the host machine with the current configuration in a really
simple way (think about RPM and SRPM).

It is unclear to me if the architecture should also provide a special
support for GUI merging (like XUL overlays in Mozilla Platform) or if
the GUI should be extended through services (implemented in C++).

Manuel Fiorelli