[SailfishDevel] Announcing "Mono for Sailfish"

[Attila Csipa]

Hey2,

I've been playing with this myself a bit, but have not gotten too far, 
summer weather, travels and all. What Ville is suggesting is exactly 
what I'm after - not a full binding set, but just a UI bridge. In API 
rich environments like python/.net/etc the "application framework" API 
parts of Qt don't mean much (and their existence/quality varies 
depending on platform anyway). Mono (and even Xamarin) falls a bit short 
on the UI side, and a good QML/QtQuick bridge would help a whole lot. 
And before someone gets the wrong idea - this is still not about having 
a single QML codebase, but rather having a "common language" for UIs 
powered by whatever is the best tech choice on the given platform 
(QtQuick, Silica, QML components wrapping native APIs, you name it).

Best regards
Attila Csipa

On 8/22/2014 11:12 AM, Ville M. Vainio wrote:
> Hey,
>
> We discussed this on twitter already, but here we go in >140 
> characters as well ;-).
>
> Making it possible to create QML applications with Mono would be 
> interesting on every platform, not merely Sailfish. Think Android, 
> iOS, desktop. Xamarin costs nontrivial amount of money, so QML + Mono 
> would be a free alternative to that (with somewhat limited 
> capabilities of course).,
>
> Better path than QtSharp would be just creating a QML bridge to Mono, 
> i.e. instantiate a QML runtime and make Mono talk with it. Example for 
> this architecture is PyOtherside (http://thp.io/2011/pyotherside/)
>
> Sufficient api would be:
>
> - register Mono functions to be callable from QML javascript
>
> Analogue: http://pyotherside.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#call
>
> - receive "signals" (free form objects) from Mono side
>
> Analogue: http://pyotherside.readthedocs.org/en/latest/#received
>
> Another example (though a lot larger) is golang-qml binding: 
> http://godoc.org/gopkg.in/qml.v1
>
> Mechanically exposing large parts of Qt's C++ api (including QML 
> engine) like sip, pyside et al are doing is probably going to yield 
> lots of unuseful code, where developers only need 2% subset, but you 
> will pay the price of the bloat and complexity anyway (troubles with 
> PySide are a good example of this). Therefore I think QtSharp is 
> suboptimal approach.
>
> Obviously I don't want to act as stop energy, but "look before you 
> leap" so to say.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 12:13 AM, Bob Summerwill <bob at summerwill.net 
> <mailto:bob at summerwill.net>> wrote:
>
>     See
>     http://www.mobilelinuxnews.com/2014/08/introduction-mono-sailfish-os-jolla/.
>
>     I'm happy to announce that development on Mono for Sailfish is
>     underway (http://monoforsailfish.com).    This is a continuation
>     of MonoTizen (http://monotizen.com), on which development has been
>     suspended because the Tizen project is broken (see
>     http://kitsilanosoftware.wordpress.com/2014/08/13/the-tizen-project-is-broken-we-will-be-spending-some-time-apart-3/).
>
>     Dimitar Dobrev, the author of https://github.com/ddobrev/QtSharp
>     has been upstreaming bug-fixes (and addressing newly discovered
>     issues in) to http://github.com/mono/CppSharp.    He'll be
>     building the bindings, and will probably end up doing the Mono
>     Runtime port as well, based on the fantastic job which Damien
>     Diederen did for the Tizen Mono Runtime.
>
>
>     Cheers,
>     Bob Summerwill, Kitsilano Software
>     http://twitter.com/bobsummerwill
>     http://bobsummerwill.com | http://kitsilanosoftware.com |
>     http://monoforsailfish.com
>
>     -- 
>     bob at summerwill.net <mailto:bob at summerwill.net>
>
>
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