[GSoC 2014] QML, Quick and Qt Designer in KDevelop (was: Integrating Clang in KDevelop)

[Denis Steckelmacher]

On 03/06/2014 08:21 PM, Sven Brauch wrote:
> On Thursday 06 March 2014 23:08:34 Sergey Kalinichev wrote:
>> BTW what is the maximum number of students per
>> project?
> Not directly, but there's a maximum number of slots KDE gets as a whole
> (usually around 50).

It seems that KDevelop gets very much attention this year! Several years 
ago, I planned to apply for the GSoC but I was finally unable to do so. 
As KDevelop already interested me, I had an idea about it: integrate Qt 
Designer and/or a QML editor into KDevelop (if there is already a plugin 
architecture allowing that, I have to check the Okteta plugin).

The motivation past then was to ease the development of GUIs. Qt 
Designer is a very nice program, but it requires the user to constantly 
switch windows between the KDevelop and the GUI builder. In fact, Qt 
Creator was announced around that time, and it has Qt Designer 
integrated into it.

The motivation is a bit different nowadays: Qt5 and KDE5 are heading 
towards QML and Javascript, and it would be wonderful that KDevelop 
supports these technologies. [1] says that there exists somewhere a 
KDevelop plugin for Javascript and QML support, but this is support for 
code completion in the code view (by the way, such a language support 
plugin is also in my field of interest). I have read some time ago that 
Qt Creator is able to display a preview of QML files, but I was never 
able find how to enable this feature (I use Qt Creator 3).

What do you think of porting the Qt Creator QML viewer or the one that 
is used in Plasmate to KDevelop, so that developers of KWin decorations, 
Plasmoids, KDE games and even applications based on Qt Quick Controls 
can see what they are doing? Do you think it could be possible not only 
to display a preview of a QML file, but also to edit it graphically (QML 
elements are not that complex, as the language is mainly declarative, 
and it should be possible to display them with some sort of property 
view and inline code editor for bindings). One problem I see, though, is 
that supporting Qt Quick would have to wait for KDevelop to be based on 
Qt5 (QML can be supported with Qt 4).

If you think that a classical widget-based form builder would be more 
useful, then two existing implementations can be used : Qt Designer and 
the one of Kexi (which uses its own form builder I think).

[1]: http://milianw.de/blog/qmljavascript-language-plugin-for-kdevelop