[Qt-jambi-interest] Qt Jambi discontinured

[Raymond Martin]

On 21 February 2009 04:48:23 Dimitri Frederickx wrote:
> I just read the notification that Qt Jambi will be discontinued. I had 
> this feeling for more than a year that Qt Jambi wasn't important for 
> Trolltech/Nokia.
> 
> 1. Qt Jambi releases followed weeks/months after Qt releases
> 2. Still no support for ActiveX.
> 3. The AWT / Qt Jambi bridge isn't part of an official release yet.
> 4. Still some major bugs in the software (Eg. The XML API's, Phonon, 
> etc.)
> 5. ...
> ...

I think your prediction of doom is premature. It is not the case necessarily
that just becuase Nokia won't back QtJambi to the fullest that it will automatically
cease to exist. The idea is to hand it over to the FOSS community, for which there
are a considerable number of very successful projects, some of which are more
successful than Qt ever will be.

As to the complaints about some missing functionality/integration. You have the
same situation with straight Java not integrating 100% cross-platform. You cannot
really expect QtJambi to supply everything cross-platform that Java has had more
than a decade to do and hasn't. It's not realistic. For those purposes you may very
well need external librairies, like the tons of Java libraries that exist.

I like QtJambi and want to continue to use it. Access to Qt from Java is a much better
offering than having to go through regular Swing or SWT for the GUI. And of course,
you get more than just GUI stuff.

The problem to me is not so much QtJambi, but management not giving it a long enough
time to mature. Now that it will be freer from the business aspects I hope the development
community will take the opportunity to grow it in ways that it never could in its previous
situation. I personally have a few ideas, like change the name, add better native integration
by doing a way will straight JNI, port the Qt development apps over to a freer "QtJambi"
implementation, and so on.

In any event, it looks like more of a loss for Nokia than for the users of QtJambi. If it succeeds
outside the confines of that business then they loose because very likely changes will be made
that cannot be used commercially (e.g., code first converted to GPL to continue development),
and they won't get all the credit for it. It also makes them look silly for not backing it more.
If it fails, again they look silly for not backing it more. Either way, credibility goes down when
you sideline a great idea.

Thanks to the whole team for all their work. And hopefully, since they will start by hosting a
community for it in its new phase, there will be a good amount of communication with the team
members to help spur progress rapidly. Let's look at it as a new phase of development, not the
end of development. The new phase and its community starts soon...

Let's discuss the what, where, and how of the new phase of QtJambi once it is freed.

Regards,

Raymond Martin