Hacker News Reader

Comment by actf | Hacker News Reader

Very cool, QML is a very promising GUI development language. I'm a huge fan of declarative UIs, and QML is great for this. For those that have experience in WPF, QML is actually very similar.

My main complaint about QML is that it really needs to ship with some desktop widgets. Without common desktop widgets, developers are forced to basically reinvent the wheel, and redefining common controls using primitives like rectangles, text, etc. Once this problem is solved though I really hope QML will take off in a big way.

View on HN

Qt5 (the one the Go support is linked against) is already much better at that, and there's further work happening both upstream and in Ubuntu.

Hmm, your installation requirements mention the Ubuntu SDK.

Is it possible to just manually install relevant QT 5 development packages, and not use the ubuntu-sdk package?

It is. The ubuntu-sdk package is just an easy way to get all the dependencies in at once, but it should work even in other operating systems.

Have you used QtQuick (particularly the QtQuick.Controls package) in Qt 5.1+? Because based on what you wrote I believe it covers a lot of what you're asking for here.

Here is an example of this: http://www.ics.com/blog/combining-qt-widgets-and-qml-qwidget...

Thanks, I haven't seen that yet. It does look promising. I was vaguely aware that work was happening on these features, but I wasn't aware of their current state.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like these are available yet in Python, as Python doesn't seem to have bindings for QtQuick 2.1, at least based on my googling. Hopefully that will come soon though!

From Phil's annoucement on the mail list, it seems PyQt5 does have full Qt 5.1 support (except for QtSerialPort and QtSensors)

(and the latest installer tagged Qt5.1.0 contains a QtQuick.pyd)

The limiting factor on pyqt5 is the internal binding to the v8 switch of qml. So when that happens, you will get native look.

While I see the benefit of using python for brevity in areas Ecmascript doesn't cover (file access, pipes, io, etc) I'd personally just write whatever scripts I was going to use inline with qml as js, because I already can assume v8 is running underneath the platform, and js is pretty fast, so think about it as an interim solution. You can actually write whole qml apps that never compile and just run on the qmlscene binary (which is just a shim frontend to the qtquickengine internals of qt to run qml files).

> For those that have experience in WPF, QML is actually very similar.

From a perusal of its Wikipedia page, I'd say it looks more like JavaFX Script.

WPF always resembled JavaFX Script also (both retained with data binding and animation support baked in), so its not very surprising.

Actually WPF is older than JavaFX Script.

I only said they resembled each other, nothing about who pee'd first.

Does QML have Mac/iOS style constraints?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com