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Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

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Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#21

Post by zura »

stusmall wrote: post #20
zura wrote: post #18

Lets hope that tools and frameworks like this will be widely adopted, thus more and more jobs requiring these skills, rather than that crap, over-engineered "native" SDKs/frameworks...

What's over engineered about Android? I work with it daily and find it quite nice and it really didn't take too much effort to dive into. Also if you want something small and simple, I think QT might be the wrong tree to bark up. I've only used it on casually used it on desktop but it is not a small framework.

Just too much plumbing and boilerplate code is needed to do some simple things...

Agree, that for some small projects, Qt can be overkill.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#22

Post by pjmlp »

cheez wrote: post #16
stusmall wrote: post #12

Does anyone have more info on what the Android/iOS support is like? Does it give native style low level binding ala Mono or does it try to be a generic API that is a write once run everywhere kind of thing?

Write once, run anywhere kind of thing. Accessing native functionality is actually not easy. I'm sure they will be addressing this at some point.

> Write once, run anywhere kind of thing.

Usually this ends up being "debug everywhere" kind of thing, based on my experience, regardless of the technology.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#23

Post by pjmlp »

c0g wrote: post #13

Can I call a Java library (say, google play services) from Qt without having to jump through JNI hoops?

Not until Google starts offering better support for the NDK.

Except for the libraries noted in the STABLE-APIS.html document, everything else is only available via JNI.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#25

Post by ghaven »

dariopy wrote: post #2

Does this mean we can create Android and iOS apps with Python (via e.g. PyQt)?

Regardless of qt, you can actually already write android and iOS apps in python via kivy (http://kivy.org/#home).

It includes a domain specific language for creating widget trees called kivy language, which I hear is not unlike qml (though I haven't tried the latter), though it all maps straight to pure python if you want to write things that way.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#26

Post by cheez »

pjmlp wrote: post #22
cheez wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write once, run anywhere kind of thing. Accessing native functionality is actually not easy. I'm sure they will be addressing this at some point.

> Write once, run anywhere kind of thing. Usually this ends up being "debug everywhere" kind of thing, based on my experience, regardless of the technology.

I'm sure it's even moreso given the different form factors of the various devices. I've given it a decent run and I think it's actually a pretty good system.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#27

Post by icefox »

Anyone have a good link (video? blog entry?) discussing what problem QML solves and why it is better than other solutions? Within the docs the biggest thing I am able to find is the following hand wavy statement:

"QML is a user interface specification and programming language. It allows developers and designers alike to create highly performant, fluidly animated and visually appealing applications. QML offers a highly readable, declarative, JSON-like syntax with support for imperative JavaScript expressions combined with dynamic property bindings."

I have heard about it for a number of years, but never been able to wrap my head around everything it is offering and why various choices were made.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#29

Post by yapcguy »

kbutler wrote: post #14
yapcguy wrote: post #7

> You can download a 30-day trial of Qt Enterprise from Digia’s Qt site (version 5.2 is slowly trickling out throughout the day). The open source version can meanwhile be snagged from Qt Project. Does anybody know the difference between the Enterprise and Open Source versions? Is it just tech support or is the Open Source version going to lack the features we really need?

The license is the critical feature: the open source version is available under GPL and LGPL. Beware of the implications for iOS development with GPL/LGPL (have to distribute source or .o files for your application).

Ok. So if you contribute to the project, you assign copyright of your code to Digia who then dual-license the project to end-users under the GPL/LGPL and for a fee, a commercial license to use it in proprietary applications. Makes sense.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#30

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

yapcguy wrote: post #7

> You can download a 30-day trial of Qt Enterprise from Digia’s Qt site (version 5.2 is slowly trickling out throughout the day). The open source version can meanwhile be snagged from Qt Project. Does anybody know the difference between the Enterprise and Open Source versions? Is it just tech support or is the Open Source version going to lack the features we really need?

The iOS and Android part is privative. There are open source approaches to do the same, but they don't share code, and use different technology, as far as I remember, the Open source one uses Dalvik while the other not in Android for example.
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