SDK/Docs/1.1/MeeGo SDK with Qt

Revision as of 11:43, 25 October 2010

From the Qt website:

"Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework. It includes a cross-platform class library, integrated development tools and a cross-platform IDE. Using Qt, you can write web-enabled applications once and deploy them across many desktop and embedded operating systems without rewriting the source code."

Qt is not a MeeGo-specific technology, but forms the basis of the handset user experience; it is also the recommended platform for developing MeeGo applications.

You can make use of a few additional frameworks (built on top of Qt) to make MeeGo development more convenient:

• Qt Mobility provides APIs for mobile device development. This includes access to a device's data (for example, sensor data, location), as well as abstractions for telephony, connectivity, contacts, multimedia and other generic services. Qt Mobility also has adapters so it can be used with QML (see below).
• MeeGo Touch Framework (MTF) is "a cross-platform application and UI framework library built on top of Qt". MTF helps when you're developing applications to fit with the MeeGo user experience model: it can assist in applying the MeeGo "look and feel", and its UI elements are optimised for touch. See MeeGo Touch Framework for details.
• QML is a declarative language for describing user interfaces, similar to JavaScript. It can be used to simplify development of your user interface, while still hooking into back-end Qt code for the application logic.

Qt development requires that you know one or two programming languages, depending on which elements you want to use:

• For Qt (including Qt Mobility and MTF), you'll need to know C++.
• For QML, you'll need to know some JavaScript and probably C++ (to write your own user interface elements or bind your application logic to the interface).

You might hear the term Qt Quick in the context of MeeGo development. This term refers to using Qt and QML in an application, running under the QML runtime.

Qt documentation

For each of the frameworks below, the main reference documentation site is listed, along with a few highlighted tutorials which are useful for getting started. The main API documentation site for MeeGo is http://apidocs.meego.com/.

Qt:

• Qt reference documentation
• How to learn Qt
• Basic principles of Qt widgets
• Longer tutorial on building a full Qt application

MeeGo Touch Framework (on the MeeGo wiki)

Qt Mobility:

• Qt Mobility reference documentation
• Qt Mobility quickstart

QML (note: as QML is an add-on for Qt, its documentation is part of the main Qt documentation):

• QML "hello world"
• Another longer QML "hello world"
• QML syntax
• Writing QML extensions with C++

Example applications and code

If you're interested in seeing some Qt applications running on MeeGo, or exploring their source code, various examples are available, either to run on the host machine or on the MeeGo target.

For an interactive demo on MeeGo, install the qt-demos package:

$ zypper install qt-demos

Run it with qtdemo from the command line, or by selecting Qt 4 examples and demos from the Applications zone.

If you want to see samples of full applications written using Qt, see http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/Code_examples/.