On the 15th and 16th July this year, KDAB attended the Qt Contributor Summit, which was co-located with the KDE Akademy conference in Bilbao, Spain.
Transport in Bilbao
The program of the Qt Contributor Summit was mostly determined by who was attending and what the important topics at the time were. KDAB attended the summit with strength, and participated in many relevant discussions.
Some pre-scheduled talks were held, including a ‘State of the Union’ from Lars Knoll, where he talked about recent additions and developments in Qt and the focus of Digia for the coming releases. The focus on advancing the mobile platform support in the next releases is well known. Challenges resulting from that focus and other known standing challenges were also listed and were part of the discussions at the summit. These included the ICU Problem, Evolution of the QML language and Bug management discussion, all relevant issues for the community and for the ongoing adoption of Qt.
The QtCore session included some future-looking considerations of how Qt will deal with C++14 and C++17 – what does Qt need from those standards, and what can Qt provide to them in terms of feedback and use-cases. Some of the recent work on the QVariant/QMetaType by Stephen Kelly of KDAB relates to type-erasure, which is a growing topic in C++ standardization discussions. The command line parser, a long requested part of Qt, has been worked on by David Faure, and there were updates about what remains to get it into the next release, and porting existing Qt tools to the new API.
QML and QtQuick were obviously also large topics for the entire summit, with many sessions relating to the technologies. Among the sessions were one dedicated to the Model-View APIs in QtQuick. A new design could be utilized to increase the flexibility and re-use of components for creating new views. Some discussions were had on how to represent hierarchical or tree structures in QML.
Recent developments in the Linux kernel for adding generic multicast local socket support are gathering momentum, and the implications of that for the QtDBus module were discussed. This could reduce the dependency of QtDBus on an external libdbus-1 on Linux. QNX also has a native message passing system which may also be usable to bypass the libdbus-1 dependency on that platform.
Both QBS and CMake were represented with sessions at the Qt Contributor Summit. The QBS session was an introduction to qbs for those who have not worked with it before, and a tour through its capabilities. The CMake session included a summary of recent and future developments in CMake which benefit Qt users, and plans for better CMake integration in QtCreator.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE
