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

[Andrei Barbu]

Sorry I haven't been following this since I was just in the middle of
moving. A few notes.

Which Qt egg are people referring to? There's Felix's original and
then there are my extensions to it. The extensions add slots and
signals with arguments, fairly complete DBus support and some basic
networking, enough to write simple things that use HTTP, as well as
some other minor things.

Concentrating on just the GUI bits seems like a nice idea at first and
it's what I tried to do. I ported the old dbus egg to v4 and attempted
to use it with Qt. It all becomes a bit of a mess unless you're ok
with polling, and since I was on a phone I definitely was not. Adding
in DBus support took about 1 day of effort, so it was pretty cheap.
Given that this was really easy I don't see how the other APIs would
be much worse, and so I'm no worried about this.

I too would like to see smoke bindings but I definitely don't have the
time. If someone wants to work with me and put in the bulk of the
effort, I can provide guidance. Keep in mind though, smoke does not
seem very straightforward and there would be quite a bit of work
involved in setting it up for chicken. Some of the bindings seem to
involve a lot of code:
http://websvn.kde.org/branches/KDE/4.5/kdebindings/

The other major question about Smoke is, how much does it need to
change when Qt and KDE change? Right now with our light bindings many
Qt changes won't affect us but if the Smoke bindings need to be
updated with every Qt point release then we're just going to have
amazing but constantly broken bindings.

Another reservation is that Smoke is part of KDE and at least on some
devices getting it installed may not be trivial, like say on the N900
or the Kindle (you can write code for the Kindle in chicken with Qt,
almost the same toolchain as for the n900). At least for me this would
be a deal-breaker but I don't know enough about Smoke to tell if this
is an issue.

QListWidget support should be really straightforward to add. If you're
using the new egg you can do it all in base-qt.scm as I've modified
the build system to generate a cpp file from it. Writing C wrappers
for every function gets really tedious in a hurry. Also, remember that
you never have to construct the widget, the ui designer does that for
you, although you will have to construct QListWidgetItem. This is
basically identical to how the QVariantList stuff is set up.




Andrei

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 09:36, Felix
<address@hidden> wrote:
> From: Martin DeMello <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: [Chicken-users] Qt egg - understanding it
> Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:05:55 +0530
>
>> 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 :)
>
> Many thanks for the offer, Martin, I'll gladly accept it.
>
>
> cheers,
> felix
>
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