

Nokia announces start of Qt 5 development - guruz
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/05/09/thoughts-about-qt-5/

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nakkiel

        In Qt 5 the entry point for applications can be QML instead of C++.                                                                                                   
        We expect that all UI will be written in QML. JavaScript will become
        a first class citizen and we expect that a lot of application logic
        will be written in JS instead of C++.
    

This is very worrying. They are basically moving from being a tool to being a
platform or a beast of that sort. They are going to adopt V8 too. It all
shounds like they are trying very hard to be the next cool thing. In other
words, they are building a totally different beast and risking they fanatic
user base.

In the end, I'm under the impression that there's a brillant guy who has been
recently hired and who is backed by the execs. That guy came to the office one
morning with his 7 pages "technical" proposition (because the guy has a bit of
technical background, y'a know) and said Qt was cool stuff but he had a vision
for the app^Wproduct.

Or.. they are trying to kill Qt.

Oh, and I'm disappointed.

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ZeSmith
Qt has been a huge platform for some time now. It's what I call the Boost
syndrome: if you want to use a small part of Qt, you have to shove your whole
arm in the machine.

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mkl
This should get better in Qt with the big modularisation effort that's
happening.

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emwa
I like the latest iteration of qt and find writing code in qml very enjoyable
for a beginner like me. What worries me is that there will be no official
support for qt in windows phone 7 now that Symbian is heading to the grave.

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joezydeco
Everything in this release says Qt/Embedded is dead and it's all about trying
to stay relevant on smartphones. Small platforms need GUIs too, and there's
just not enough MIPS on those platforms to handle QML and it's Javascript
interpreter and all the other crap that goes with it. QML is a _dog_ on
anything below 700 MHz.

 _"Qt will require OpenGL (ES) 2.0 to work."_

Sigh... Guess we're all using 4.7/4.8 forever.

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pavlov
I wouldn't write off Qt/Embedded just yet. Nokia has regularly made noises
about their wish to eventually use Qt on Series 40.

Series 40 is their dumb-/featurephone OS. It powers most of the billion phones
that Nokia sells yearly, and it's not set to be replaced by Windows Phone.
There's no way OpenGL ES will make an appearance on those devices for a long
while.

The Qt 5 announcement made a point of emphasizing maximum source compatibility
between Qt 4 and 5. It seems likely to me that Qt 4 will still see some
development from Nokia.

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joezydeco
So you're going to try and run V8 on a Series 40 class processor? This is just
getting silly.

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jerf
Pavlov is clearly implying they must have plans not involving all that
heavyweight stuff on low-end devices, not that they're going to just jam it on
anyhow.

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pavlov
Yeah, that's it -- I guess my point was not very well articulated.

To be clear, I think Nokia is going to maintain an active branch of Qt 4.x for
Series 40, and that work will benefit Embedded Linux as well.

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stephenr
I don't use Qt but at a glance QML sounds like XUL all over again to me, and
we all know how _great_ the UI's created with XUL are.

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smogzer
Been using QML for about 16 months, since it was in a development branch. I
believe it has alot of potential for development of frontends and also I see
it as a kind of a replacement of html which was created with static documents
in mind, and then got aumented with other paradigms (css, javascript, dom,
etc).

I feel the QML language is in a embrionary state yet, they are writing the use
cases and writing the language at the same time, which will in time show some
redundancies in the concepts they use now. Example: 1)there should be more
(multiple) inheritance so that we could derive from QML elements like we do in
OOP; 2) there was no ability to access the items ids like in a DOM tree.

But what sets a project IMHO is the ambition and the goals. And this team has
both, and their work will deliver.

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atrain34
why?

