Re: [Chicken-users] Qt egg - understanding it

[Martin DeMello]

Yes, having the Qt egg concentrate on GUI support seems like the best
way to me too. If I manage to get some free time next week, I'll have
a proper try at putting in QListWidget support, since it seems like
reasonably low-hanging fruit and would help me get the hang of the
code to some extent. It's definitely nice to see the sudden surge of
interest in the Qt egg - there really aren't enough options for
writing native apps using Qt.

martin

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 12:29 AM, Arthur Maciel <address@hidden> wrote:
> Martin, indeed Smoke seems to do what it is proposed to, but Chicken team is
> at an unfavorable moment for it: there are few people with a good
> knowledge+time score to explore that kind of solution.
>
> I thought about setting the Qt egg to give the maximum of GUI support,
> leaving other functionalities to other eggs. For this, direct implementing
> each of GUI widgets seems to be the best way. However, one of the great
> advantages of Qt is to integrate many non-GUI functionalities into GUI
> (DBUS/IPC, networking,databases, XML processing support, etc.). With this in
> mind I imagine the only practical solution would be to build the giant
> wrapper or invest on porting Smoke.
>
> Let's wait for Felix and Andrei to have their time, even in order to point
> us a direction on where we can help. Until then I believe what we can do is
> exactly what you have done: to list what needs we expect the egg to support.
> If those resume to strict GUI stuff, we can dedicate our learning effort to
> extend the multiple GUI widgets after the guys set the coordinates.
>
> Regards,
> Arthur
>
> 2010/8/25 Martin DeMello <address@hidden>
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Felix
>> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> >
>> > Parsing the headerfiles is not that easy - there is a lot of magic
>> > in there and complex macros. You also would end up with a huge pile
>> > of wrapper code. There appear to be ways to invoke object-methods
>> > dynamically, though. But as I said repeatedly: I need some time
>> > to look into it.
>>
>> Another approach would be to try to bind to smoke - there are Ruby and
>> C# bindings to act as an example, though when I asked Andrei about it
>> he said smoke was complex and poorly documented. I'm coming around to
>> his pov, that adding widgets in the order that people feel the need
>> for them would get us more bang for the buck.
>>
>> Also, as others have noted, I would love to help with the Qt egg; I
>> just don't know enough about Qt or FFI bindings to C++. I can happily
>> contribute gruntwork once someone else has pointed the way, though :)
>>
>> As a personal priority, I'd like to have bindings for keystroke
>> events, QListWidgetItem and the whole QGraphicsView/QGraphicsScene
>> framework (the latter might be more of a pipe dream at this point :))
>> I tried looking at the development egg, but couldn't figure out how to
>> add a new widget type, or whether I could just manipulate it as a
>> QWidget.
>>
>> martin
>
>