At Tue Apr 17 04:09:07 CEST 2012 Alan Alpert started a flamewar about QML. Whoops. But the thread did reach an appropriate conclusion as to where the rants should go; put it on an aggregated blog. Since I forgot to do that back then, here’s an expanded version of the essay now. The content is still accurate, but I’ve added two more paragraphs on the end to elucidate it further.
I’ve been thinking a lot about cross-platform QML recently, and I’m about to email the dev list with a suggestion. But the conceptual background essay is here instead of in the mail this time. Hopefully this will help better organize the information – it certainly allowed me to go into much greater depth on the wider issue 🙂 .
Hooray, Qt5 is out! One of the new features I’m most excited about is the particle system, which replaces the old and simple labs one (easy porting guide here). What I’m really excited about though is seeing what people come up with when using it.
This week I started eight threads on the Qt dev mailing list, and it’s not because I like writing essays. This blog post is because I like writing essays. I just have a lot to talk about, and in classic meta-cognition style I’d like to talk a lot about why I’m talking a lot.
I wrote a chat client!
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that I like writing QML games, my gitorious account is littered with the prototypes I’ve thrown up in a few hours for fun. I’ve done another one which has proved to be extra-large: about a full working day’s effort scattered across a couple of nights.https://github.com/416365416c/checkers has a QML checkers prototype, with Human-on-Human and VS AI modes. It was fun and educational, which is good because checkers isn’t a very interesting game otherwise 😉 .
QML (and QtQuick) versioning is not the same as Qt versioning. This is understandably confusing for some people, so let me take the long-form approach and describe the what, why and how of QML versioning. Note: This is the essay version. The technical version with code snippets is in the docs where it should be. As an essay version it’s mostly “why”, for better answers to “what” clone the repository and look at the examples. For better answers to how clone and read the source code for the engine; qqmlengine.cpp contains fewer lines than this blog post 😉 .
You need to read the Qt blog before mine, Digia’s acquisition post is assumed knowledge for this post. I for one welcome Qt’s new corporate overlords and hope this is a lovely trolltech-style period of fantastic development; before another huge company buys Qt for millions. Qt deserves another chance at world domination in a few years.
Take this with a grain of salt, because I recommend QML for everything, but I really think that QML is a great choice for a data storage language.