Carbide.c++ and Qt
The Carbide.c++ team has released the first Milestone release of Carbide.c++ 2.0.
There are two interesting things about this release.
The first is that an indexer bug has been fixed to work with templated types. Symbian OS descriptors are usually templated types, and so this is a big deal. It means a lot of features now work with Symbian APIs which previously didn’t - such as the call hierarchy, F3 to open definition, etc.
Just like in previous Carbide.c++ versions, when Carbide can’t understand your code, the code is shown in grey. The difference is that in previous Carbide builds it was probably a Carbide bug, whereas now it’s 99% likely to be a bug in your code. Several times now I’ve thought to myself, “oh, that code looks fine, Carbide must be imagining it” and sure enough, the indexer is right, I’ve messed something up.
For those reasons alone I wholeheartedly recommend joining the Carbide.c++ 2.0 beta and using the new version.
The second thing is the presence of a new perspective in Carbide.c++ - a Qt perspective. A few months ago, you might have noticed Nokia bought Trolltech, the makers of Qt. At the time there was speculation about what Nokia would do. Would they port Qt on top of S60? Would they replace S60? Would they start to make Linux/QT phones?
Well, the first answers are beginning to appear in this version of Carbide.c++. For example, the Qt perspective has editors for Qt actions, properties, objects, slots and widgets. That seems a lot to me, and although these views appear to belong to a com.trolltech.qtcppdesigner package and therefore aren’t produced by the Carbide.c++ team, it looks like a lot of the effort in Carbide.c++ 2.0 has gone into Qt work as well as Symbian work. I may be wrong!
Also, the Qt perspective doesn’t show the Symbian Project Navigator view. There’s nothing in that view which is specific to Symbian UIs - it’s all about the Symbian build system. That suggests to me that whatever Qt stuff is going to be happening in Carbide.c++ 2.0, it will not involve the Symbian build system, which in turn means it’s based on Linux (or something) rather than Symbian.
Again, I may be wrong, but that’s my prediction. It looks to me like Carbide.c++ is going to turn into a dual-purpose tool: Qt/Linux as well as S60/Symbian, rather than Qt-on-Symbian. It will be interesting to find out if I’m completely off the mark.
(Incidentally, this leads onto another vague interest of mine - getting the cross-platform make system cmake to generate Symbian OS MMP and bld.inf files. I vaguely plan to investigate that one day, but haven’t yet. I believe that KDE uses cmake, which suggests it’s popular in the Qt world. If there is any crossover, perhaps that’s been done somewhere already.)
August 13th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Adrian,
Much of what you’re seeing in M1 is from the pre-existing Trolltech Eclipse plugins. We’ve integrated them in, with modifications to make sure things work well with Symbian projects. So this doesn’t represent any decreased effort on the Symbian tools, just leveraging what’s already there.
Dan.
August 13th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Hi Dan, thanks for the information. To me that’s interesting too, as it suggests there is some plan for Symbian & Qt integration eventually. Time will tell!