Cross-platform QML

Editor: Andrew Flegg

Alan Alpert - a Qt engineer who's worked at Trolltech, Nokia and now RIM - has posted his thoughts on improving the cross-platform support of QML: Since the number of QML-based platforms just keeps growing, it might be best to improve the ‘write once, deploy everywhere’ story for QML. Currently the story is to write the UI once for each platform because QML makes that incredibly easy and fun, but I think we can improve on that. So I’ve been thinking about what simple features could be added to the language that would help write cross-platform UIs. The goal here is to minimize the porting effort of applications, and as always my exemplar is SameGame. We can all agree that SameGame should work on every QML enabled platform, and it was awesome to see it running on BlackBerry 10 at Dev Days. What was not awesome was how they did it.

In your editor's opinion, something needs to be done here. Even if Ubuntu, Qt Quick, Harmattan and Symbian components had a common API, the "import" statements end up complicating things for developers. Although the overall shell of each application may well be different, core components within the application could be reusable. I've excluded Cascades as it isn't interoperable with non-Cascades QML - a fundamental mistake on the part of RIM, I think.