[RQt-devel] direction of Qt

[Michael Lawrence]

Hi guys,

Recently, Nokia has been making some statements about the course of Qt
development. Frankly, it is pretty concerning. They have shifted focus to
the "Qt Quick" framework, which is meant to be "designer-oriented" and
driven from a declarative Javascript-based language called QML. This means
that previous "core" classes like QWidget, the whole QGraphicsView framework
upon which qtpaint is based, and the existing (fast) QPainter
implementations, are now in "maintenance mode" at best. There will be a move
to mobile-friendly OpenGL ES paint engines, which are way slower than the
previous OpenGL implementation for many of the drawing modes in qtpaint. In
fact, the GL engine currently used by qtpaint has been officially abandoned
by Nokia (while we can volunteer to maintain it, it's probably better to
just scavenge it for its fast paths). While minor, support for SVG output
has also been dropped.

As far as developing a GUI with R (via qtbase), one can either use the
maintenance-mode QWidget-based system, or clumsily interact with the QML DOM
via the QtDeclarative module. Perhaps the best role for R in such a scenario
would be to expose R-based classes to QML, but then people need to learn
Javascript.

Meanwhile, GTK+/Cairo keep moving along, with a cool new HTML5 backend,
multi-touch support, and Android in the works... maybe goocanvas is worth a
hard look (despite it being in maintenance mode itself)...

Michael
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