Akademy 2017 Program

Although Qt has evolved, over the past years, into a quite effective toolkit for building cross-platform mobile applications, the lack of reusable architectural solutions and productivity tools still hampers a wider adoption of Qt by mobile development industry. This talk presents the initial thoughts and preliminary implementation of a modular and flexible framework for building Qt mobile applications. The solution relies on the use of code generators and a plugin-based architecture to automate the implementation of recurrent tasks, such as user authentication, CRUD implementation, local storage, and client-server communication via RESTful.

Although Qt has evolved, over the past years, into a quite effective toolkit for building cross-platform mobile applications, the lack of reusable architectural solutions and productivity tools still hampers a wider adoption of Qt by the mobile development industry. Novice Qt mobile developers usually spend a lot of time thinking about how to correctly partition functionality, deciding about local and remote communication patterns, choosing effective UI strategies, and coping with specific platform idiosyncrasies. Unless appropriate engineering and experience are put in place, this usually results in applications which are hard to develop/maintain, difficult to reuse, and highly prone to bugs.

This talk presents the initial thoughts and preliminary implementation of a modular and flexible framework for building Qt mobile applications. The solution relies on the use of code generators and a plugin-based architecture to automate the implementation of recurrent tasks, such as user authentication, CRUD implementation, local storage, and client-server communication via RESTful.

The framework provides two main technologies: i) a command-line tool which works as a code generator; and ii) a modular and flexible architecture for mobile information systems. The command-line tool has been developed in Ruby, using the Thor toolkit (http://whatisthor.com/) and already provides basic commands for generating new application's skeletons and adding new models and views for CRUD operations. It also provides generators for building RESTful services based on Ruby Sinatra framework. Generated code automatically implements a flexible architecture where functionality, navigation drawer construction, and CRUD operations are added by plugins. We believe such a tool may be useful to support the rapid construction of well-designed Qt mobile applications by automating the generation of core functionality and setting the stage for reusable and easy-to-maintain applications.

Info

Day: 2017-07-22
Start time: 16:30
Duration: 00:30
Track: Technical Talk

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