KDevelop and the Qt Designer

[Mark Hatch]

I think that this type of facility would be useful in general for other tools.
>From our experience in integrating our GUI Builder (BX PRO) with Source
Navigator, other useful facilities would include:

1. Communication mechanism so that files generated by a GUI builder (or other
code generator) could be included in the project
2. Communication mechanism so that search paths for include files and libraries
could be added within the build mechanism.

I suggest that Corba or some other "arms length" mechanism be used so that
Kdevelop users could use their choice of tools that might be licensed under
licenses other than GPL.

Mark

Reginald Stadlbauer wrote:

> Hi!
> Hope you guys have already heared about our new GUI designer. As we finally
> decided about a week ago to release it under the GPL (as you can see in Qt
> 2.2.0beta1), I have some suggestions regarding integration with KDevelop.
>
> Some time ago (on LinuxTag) I met Ralph and we talked about making the Qt
> Designer a bit more integrated into KDevelop. Now I have some thoughts about
> it and would like to share them with you.
>
> I'm thinking about a way as we did it with the Visual Studio plugin of the
> desiger. This means it does some communication with KDevelop, so that .ui
> files are not opened in KDevelop, but in the Qt Designer. For the beginning
> we might not even need to actually embed the designer in kdevelop, but it
> would be enough that it runs as a toplevel applicattion and just when you
> click on a .ui file in kdevelop, it is opened in the designer and the
> designer window is raised. This means not every time a ui file has to be
> opened a new instance of the designer is opened, but that it is opened in the
> existing designer. The designer supports such a mode through a commandline
> client anyway, so that shouldn't be a problem to do.
> ('designer -client ui-files' starts the designer if none is running with the
> ui files, else the ui files are opened in an already running designer)
>
> And as the user interface of the designer is quite complex anyway, it will be
> quite some work to really make it possible to embed it in kdevelop and merge
> the GUI through a plugin architecture. So for the beginning I'd prefer such a
> way, where both apps just communicate and run as seperate apps, but on the
> long term the goal would or could be of course to integrate it more tightely
> (embedding as another view, etc.)
>
> So besides that, kdevelop would need some support for the ui files and the
> uic (user interface compiler) in the project management and build system.
>
> Now I have to admit, that I didn't use kdevelop yet besides some playing with
> it. So I don't know whether there is a plugin architecture or not (or do you
> use KParts?).
>
> So my questions are, if there is already some plugin/tools system which
> allows to do this first step of integration (when clicking on a ui file not
> opening it in kdevelop but running the commandline command to open the file
> in the Qt designer). Also are you willing to integrate the ui-file/uic
> concept in kdevelop - or are you at all interested in such an integration?
>
> If there is some interest, I'll of course also help with some coding.
>
> Comments and suggestions welcomed!
>
> --
> Reggie (reggie at trolltech.com)