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

[Sven Brauch]

On Thursday 06 March 2014 21:30:46 Denis Steckelmacher wrote:
> It seems that KDevelop gets very much attention this year!
True, I didn't see much interested people in the last years.

> 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).
That probably wouldn't be terribly difficult from both kdevelop's and 
designer's side. See for example http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qdesignerformeditorinterface.html.
I know there's quite some people who want this feature; personally, I'm not 
really that excited about it, since the only effect of such integration I can 
see is having the designer widget in a kdevelop document instead of a separate 
window. Which is not really a difference usability-wise (and if it is, you 
need to fix your window manager setup ;)). But maybe I'm overlooking some 
awesome things we could do with such integration.

> [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).
For this plugin indeed a lot of work could be done, and I think it's an 
interesting and promising thing to work on. Especially (better) JS language 
support would certainly be very much appreciated by users.

> 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).
I can't really comment on that, but using UI to edit text files you also edit 
by hand has a high intrinsic complexity.

Greetings!
Sven