…just another hippy blog

How Enterprise Software Is Designed
Originally uploaded by _mpd_.

You won’ believe it, but I managed to refactor the source code for Movida, finally, without (completely) loosing my mind.

The old code was quite a mess because I was doing lots of experiments with the new Qt 4 API.

It took me a few days but (except for some link time errors due to some problems in my msvc.net project file) te source code (or most of it) can now be read by another human being. This was quite important because I am going to put a snapshot on the website as soon as possible (another couple of days, I suppose).

Please cross your fingers and hope I won’t be wasting most of my time looking at Visual Studio’s wonderful crash reports. Ratts! I still need to install the latest SuSe on my desktop! It might sound pretty strange, but I was experiencing some problems when installing SuSe with a module of broken RAM

Photo by ” Runs With Scissors” - Creative Commons licensed

I’ve missed the QDevBlog today (or rather yesterday, since midnight is over by a while) and what did I miss? Nothing really important. Uma Thurman still won’t answer to my love letters, ratts!

Ok, seriously, the first Qt Jambi beta has been released. The QDevBlog entry contains some more details but it’s far to late for me to try it out.

I would need at least 236mg more caffeine and 2 triple chocolate muffins. More would be deadly - ever heard of “triple chocolate muffin overdose”? It’s one of the most common causes of death in Ireland. The first one is Guinness overdose, no doubt ;).

Well, don’t move to a planet without Internet connection (unless uma thurman does) or you might miss my jambi beta post with lots of bikinis and dancing bellies.

Trolltech releases the third and last technical preview of their Qt bindings for Java. Lots of work has been done since the TP2 and lots of work still needs to be done.

This version is based on Qt 4.2 and thus it can benefit from the new features in Qt 4.2 (see my previous post). Some of the major changes include support for SVG graphics (this was added to Qt 4.1), the QGraphicsView (there’s a funny demo showing some mice ;), support for JavaDoc and “real” enums.

Some words about enums: C++ and Java enums are conceptually very different. Enums are used in different ways in Qt. Some examples are the QEvent::Type extensible enumerator and the or-combinable flags in QIODevice::OpenMode. Java flags can only be used as enumerators. TP3 solves this issue allowing to use enums with Qt even if the syntax is sometimes different.

The Eclipse plugin has been updated too, and lots of bugs have been fixed. I used it for some hours without Eclipse crashing! The Qt Jambi resource system still needs to be integrated into the Qt Jambi Designer (and it’s Eclipse integration). You can add resources using the Action Editor in TP3, but the JUIC would produce wrong prefixes and the files woun’t get loaded. Trolltech developer Eskil Blomfeldt has told me that this issue will be solved in a future release and we will be able to use the resource system with the Qt Jambi Designer too.

I was reading some posts on the Trolltech Qt-Interest archive and it seems that KDevelop developers are working on a Java language parser. This means we may be able to see a Qt Jambi plugin for KDevelop in (a not so near) future. Jakob Petsovits and Italian Roberto Raggi (a former student at my own University in Pisa should be the main developers for the Java-code.

Trolltech recently released the second (out of three planned) technology preview of the Qt bindings for Java: Qt Jambi.
This should be some good news for the many Java developers out there… a big mass to which I will always refuse to belong The project currently seems more an experiment as a real commercial product. Trolltech itself still does not know when (and if at all) the final product will be released.
As to my precious opinion (sure, laugh!!) I bet they will release it pretty soon. And with lots of bugs, at least until version x.1.

Read more

I finally found some time to take a look to the new Qt 4.2 technology preview (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qt4-2-intro.html).

It seems like people at Trolltech are still doing a great work. I really love the Qt toolkit (well, I think you either love it or you hate it and prefer writing CLI apps or lisp powered GUIs and every release seems adding great new features, besides to usability and performance enhancements.

Here are just some of the new features:

• Desktop Services for accessing common desktop services
• Graphics View - A powerful 2D graphics area for highly optimized graphics development
• Widget stylesheets
• QWidgetAction allows to add QWidgets to menus
• Text completition framework
• Support for Inter-Process Communication (IPC) using the D-BUS protocol on Linux and Unix systems
• QNetworkInterface class for detection and reporting of network interfaces
• A new Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) icon engine
• Qt’s keyboard handling has been improved to support physical key recognition

The final release of Qt 4.2 is currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2006. As with Qt 4.0 and 4.1, I would prefer to wait for the first bug fix release of the Qt 4.2 series (4.2.1 or later) for production use.