Experience so far with QML (was Re: dependencies on KJS/KHTML in kdelibs and kdebase-runtime)

[Artur de Souza]

Quoting Stephen Kelly <steveire at gmail.com>:
> I'd be interested in reading what makes you say that. I've had difficulties
> with QML too, but sometimes have trouble putting my finger on what exactly
> the problem is.

If I'm not wrong I would say that Aaron was talking about the "low  
level" integration of QML with, for example, existing JS bindings and  
this kind of work. From the UI point of view we don't have many  
problems with QML itself, neither the language as in Plasma a lot of  
stuff is already prepared for the declarative approach. Our problems  
start when we need to integrate with QML: due to implementation  
"details" it's almost impossible to do it in a proper way (without  
hacks).

> I think it's a general difficulty in melding the non-declarative parts of an
> application to the declarative parts. The interface between them to get
> state or information from one to the other 'world' is not always obvious.
> Some of my specific issues with it are quite particular to model-view,
> though with some additional action-related gripes.

"Thinking declarative" is a very different approach and it takes time  
to make it right(tm). It's specially very hard when we are in a  
transitional state, porting the application from one approach to  
another (imperative vs declarative). From my pov, this is the state of  
kontact-mobile for instance. It's much much easier when you write from  
scratch the application, already thinking that the UI will be  
declarative.

> I think it's here to stay, so it would be good to get a better handle on
> what these issues are.

I hope we can discuss more of this during the mobile sprint as it's  
way more easier to discuss this when we are together :P (at least for  
me hehe).

Best regards,

Artur

-------------------------------------------