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Meteor and Qt

achipa.blogspot.com

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Meteor and Qt

#11
There were some concerns as to how native this is - I'm not rendering any HTML. The client side does use the JSON-style QML, but that's just the declarative UI language of Qt - your high-performance code can be C++, Java, or whatever is the native language of the platform. If you wish, though, you can write your whole app in JavaScript, too, but that's an option, not a requirement.

Re: Meteor and Qt

#12
post #2

There is a lot opinions on HNews that Meteor is too monolithic and it's bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8772563 However, that kind of projects show the opposite. It is in fact very modular.

Agreed. I think a lot of that is based on Meteor (understandably) pushing their entire stack. I've always been intrigued by their docs which state: By default all apps include the meteor-platform package. This automatically pulls in the packages that make up the core Meteor stack. If you want to build your own custom stack, just remove meteor-platform from your app and add back in whichever of the standard packages y…

True - even for DDP there are already a number of client libraries not strictly related to Meteor front-ends, as seen from http://meteorpedia.com/read/DDP_Clients

Re: Meteor and Qt

#13
post #8

What's the difference between this and Xamarin?

This is a more full-stack approach - Qt and Xamarin are geared more towards creating standalone apps. What you get here is the reactive back-end (plus web-site for free). This setup can be used for both data and UI - you could for example publish a new UI (not just content), and all native apps would automatically be updated on the fly. If you take a look at the video - if you do this with Xamarin (or Qt) you would n…

It's worth noting that if you wanted to create this kind of real-time app with a Xamarin frontend, you could do it quite easily with ASP.NET on the backend and SignalR.

Re: Meteor and Qt

#14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a more full-stack approach - Qt and Xamarin are geared more towards creating standalone apps. What you get here is the reactive back-end (plus web-site for free). This setup can be used for both data and UI - you could for example publish a new UI (not just content), and all native apps would automatically be updated on the fly. If you take a look at the video - if you do this with Xamarin (or Qt) you would n…

It's worth noting that if you wanted to create this kind of real-time app with a Xamarin frontend, you could do it quite easily with ASP.NET on the backend and SignalR.

That's certainly possible for the data part - but a lot harder for UI/code. With the method I'm using, you can actually push code AND UI to the client on the fly. As far as I know, that's a lot more difficult with Xamarin.

Also, the licensing is a lot more flexible than with Xamarin and Qt does provide support for more platforms.

Re: Meteor and Qt

#15
Wow, QML looks... really nice. Has anyone used it to deploy cross-platform apps to iOS/Android? What was your experience? Biggest drawbacks?

Re: Meteor and Qt

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that if you wanted to create this kind of real-time app with a Xamarin frontend, you could do it quite easily with ASP.NET on the backend and SignalR.

That's certainly possible for the data part - but a lot harder for UI/code. With the method I'm using, you can actually push code AND UI to the client on the fly. As far as I know, that's a lot more difficult with Xamarin. Also, the licensing is a lot more flexible than with Xamarin and Qt does provide support for more platforms.

It looks attractive, but at these times, the client application can be easily be auto-updated, that's how all applications work, including those made by Google.

Re: Meteor and Qt

#17
post #15

Wow, QML looks... really nice. Has anyone used it to deploy cross-platform apps to iOS/Android? What was your experience? Biggest drawbacks?

As of 2012:

* Lack of documentation about QML itself (first and third party)

* Unhandled or unsupported corner case like trees that are a pain to implement using recursive rectangles

* Very limited set of widgets (this has improved)

* Ubuntu/Blackberry/Sailfish/PlasmaActive SDK are incompatible

You can hack your way around and get back a good old imperative QPainter and be done with it, but it kind of void the whole point.

Re: Meteor and Qt

#18
post #3

Hi, I'm Attila, the developer of Qondrite - the interface between Meteor and Qt in the article. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, I'm always looking for new perspectives, comments and will be happy to answer!

Really impressive work, thank you. I intend taking an in-depth look later, but just at the moment I hope you'll indulge a more-or-less off topic question; What tool did you use to create the youtube demo on your blog ?

Re: Meteor and Qt

#19
post #17
post #15

Wow, QML looks... really nice. Has anyone used it to deploy cross-platform apps to iOS/Android? What was your experience? Biggest drawbacks?

As of 2012: * Lack of documentation about QML itself (first and third party) * Unhandled or unsupported corner case like trees that are a pain to implement using recursive rectangles * Very limited set of widgets (this has improved) * Ubuntu/Blackberry/Sailfish/PlasmaActive SDK are incompatible You can hack your way around and get back a good old imperative QPainter and be done with it, but it kind of void the whole…

In all honesty, Qt has come a long way since 2012 - QML is reasonably well documented nowadays. Controls (the widget library), while not a silver bullet, are good enough (at least on Android, haven't used iOS all that much) so normally you don't need to go as low as your own QPainter or even Rect-s.

Re: Meteor and Qt

#20
post #3

Hi, I'm Attila, the developer of Qondrite - the interface between Meteor and Qt in the article. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, I'm always looking for new perspectives, comments and will be happy to answer!

Really impressive work, thank you. I intend taking an in-depth look later, but just at the moment I hope you'll indulge a more-or-less off topic question; What tool did you use to create the youtube demo on your blog ?

I used a Chrome extension - Screencastify ( https://www.screencastify.com/ )
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