PhoneGap for Qt

Testing Continues

We've recently been running the Cordova tests and making some fixes to get them to run better. We've documented on the Wiki how to run the Cordova tests. See the section "Running Cordova Tests" at this wiki page. We hope to have a demo video up soon showing the tests running on the simulator and Nokia phones.

Incidently, the Qt Wiki recently moved from http://wiki.qt-project.org/ to http://qt-project.org/wiki/ The older Wiki will go away at some point.

We made a couple more videos showing a preliminary version of Wikipedia Mobile running on Cordova Qt. The first video shows it running on a phone. The second describes how to build it with Qt Creator. The third also shows Qt Creator but was recorded on the desktop rather than with a camera. Unfortunately the video quality is still probably not high enough for you too see clearly what is being typed in Qt Creator.

See:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_ay0U5FIts&feature=youtu.be
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMx-tyyOXgc&feature=youtu.be
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43WE1vkYBY4&feature=youtu.be

The Qt 5 release is progressing but it is looking like it will take a little longer than planned. The current plan is for a beta release in time for the Qt Contributors Summit in June, probably followed by another beta in early August and a release mid to end of August. Unlike the initial alpha release, the beta release should have binary packages for the supported platforms, making it easier for people to use it.

The vouchers for the Raspberry Pi systems being given out as part of the QtonPi device program can now finally be redeemed with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Most of us have by now sent our shipping details to get our boards. No word yet on when they will actually ship. We expect it is taking them some time to manually process the special orders for these 400 or so boards which are going to various places around the world.

Some people have tried out Cordova Qt and sent us feedback. We appreciate that and are working to solve any problems that people report.

 

Qt 5 Alpha Out, Raspberry Pi Shipping

Work has been slowing down somewhat as Qt 5 has been firming up for release. The Qt 5 alpha came out on April 3rd and we tested our code with it. Work is moving ahead for a Qt 5 beta release and then the 5.0.0 final this summer.

Qt 4.8.1 also came out and we tested Cordova Qt with it. A 4.8.2 is expected in the next few weeks, indicating that Qt 4 is still actively being developed and is expected to do so for some time until Qt 5 is stable. Realistically I would expect many people to continue to use Qt 4 at least until Qt 5.1 is out, as some of the Qt Quick 2 C++ APIs will not be finalized until then. (Of course there are always very late adopters, there a still people using Qt 3!).

We've recently been focusing on testing using the Cordova tests. We'll post details on the Wiki about how to run the tests and the results we obtain.

The Raspberry Pi boards are now shipping in volume. They came a little too late to be of much use during most of this project but we will be looking at it as another Qt 5 reference platform. I got details today on how to redeem the voucher for the unit assigned to this project.

A webcast on "PhoneGap, Apache Cordova, and Qt" is now available at the ICS Network web site.

Qt 5 alpha release is imminent!

In the past week or so we commited some more code for Contacts and Notification. Camera support has been submitted as a pull request.

We are doing some testing on Symbian with a Nokia E7 phone  as we haven't done much testing on Symbian up to now.

I updated the README.md file to better reflect the current status. I also added some links to the Wiki on Getting Started.

We posted a YouTube video of Wikipedia Mobile running on a Nokia N9 running Cordova Qt. This can be considered alpha quality. We ran into some issues with WebKit on Qt 4 on MeeGo Harmattan that we are investigating.We also ported one of our internal web applications that ran on Android using PhoneGap to Cordova for Qt.

The Qt 5 alpha slipped from it's planned release last week but appears to be getting close and we expect it will be out this week. We are eager to try it out and test our code with it. We've already checked in a few updates needed for recent changes in Qt 5.The details of the alpha release are here and information on Qt 5 in general is here.

The Qt 4.8.1 release is also expected shortly, hopefully this week.

Odds 'n Ends

Throughout this project one thing that has been constantly changing has been the source code repositories, both due to several project names changes and with the move to being run as an Apache project.

This last week the old repository at http://github.com/cordova/cordova-qt was removed and replaced by the read-only repository at http://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-qt. The upstream repository is at http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=incubator-cordova-qt.git. Changes made to the Apache repository get mirrored to github. Developers who are not maintainers can submit pull requests to the github repository where they will get reviewed, commited. and applied back to the Apache repository. They will then show up on the mirrored repository on github.

Contacts support is now in review as a pull request. Confirm notifications is ready to submit and should appear shortly. We found that Camera support had to be done in a platform dependent way. We have implemented it for Harmattan as that is the main platform we are focussing on.

It is good to see that some open source developers have been contributing recently, mostly Qt 4 Symbian support.

We've started looking at porting the Wikipedia PhoneGap application to PhoneGap for Qt as a test. It looks feasible and we've made some good progress. 

We are still waiting to get our hands on a Raspberry Pi board. We have a voucher for a board allocated to this project but the details of how and when the vouchers get redeemed have not been worked out yet.

The alpha release of Qt 5 is expected to come out around March 20. This should generate more visibility for Qt 5 and get it into the hands of more developers. We'll test our code against it when it becomes available. A Qt 4.8.1 bugfix release should also be out in the next week or two.

I've prepared the material for a short webcast on PhoneGap, Cordova, and Qt that will show up on The ICS Network once the video is edited.

Move to QML

Since the last posting we properly set up deployment of Cordova Qt for MeeGo Harmattan (e.g. the Nokia N9 phone). We also got Qt 5 packages including WebKit built for MeeGo Harmattan and tested it on a Nokia N9. Incidently, a big PR1.2 software update rolled out this week for MeeGo Harmattan phones.

Both the Qt 4 and Qt 5 versions now use a QML WebView as there is no support for widgets on some mobile platforms. However, Symbian S60 systems may still be using Qt 4.6 which doesn't support QML so it looks like we still need to maintain a widget-based version for these systems.

More of the team got commit access to github. There is is now an "upstream" repository that is getting updates from git hub.

WebKit has a useful debug tool called Web Inspector. You can enable it with a setting and access it from the right click menu. Unfortunately, on a touch screen device there is no right click. After a little research we came across a solution for this - someone developed support for a remote web inspector called Weinre. It seems to work well. You can run the inspector on a another machine, like a desktop, where you have a keyboard and more screen space to work with.

On the API side we are currently implementing Notifications, Camera, Media, Capture and Contacts.

The Raspberry Pi project started taking orders this week. I have a voucher from Nokia for a Raspberry Pi board that was designated for use with this project. I will redeem it as soon as the Raspberry Pi site is fully back up and taking orders. Hopefully it will get shipped soon (there is a build of 10,000 units on the way) and I can try it out with QtonPi.

Corinthian Leather

[Posted by Jeff Tranter]

This week we switched to the new repository. Some pull requests from the old repository had to be resubmitted. Changes were committed for :

• Patches to get code to compile with Qt 5 (still backwards compatible with Qt 4)
• Adding Compass sensor suport
• Renaming references to Callback or PhoneGap to Cordova
• Changes to use QML WebView in the Qt 5 version

Pull requests are in review for Accelerometer support and Alerts. We're also moving to using a QML WebView for the Qt 4 version as there are some limitations with the C++ QWebView widget (at least on MeeGo Harmattan) that this will overcome. If anyone can test the code on Symbian we would appreciate it as we haven't had a chance to test it on that platform yet.

I have commit access to the repository now and merged some of the pull requests this week.

We did some testing with Qt 4 on Nokia N9 and N950 phones and are looking into some deployment issues there. It is working, but not "out of the box". We hope to test with Qt 5 on the phones soon but don't yet have Qt 5 installed.

We're hearing there will be an upstream repo at https://github.com/apache/incubator-cordova-qt but it is not there yet.

I'm looking forward to seeing the first Qt 5 preview/alpha release but haven't heard any more news about it's progress this week.

Speaking of the name Cordova, it is the English spellng of Córdoba, a city in Spain. To North Americans the name is usually associated with the Chrysler Cordoba, a popular automobile known for it's television commercials featuring Ricardo Montalban extoling the virtues of its "Soft Corinthian Leather".

Repos Moving

(posted by Jeff Tranter)

This week we finished implementing some Cordova APIs (at least for the Qt 4 version). Compass and Accelerometer are done and some of Events was implemented. Notification is done as is most of File support and we are starting work on Contacts and Camera.

Note that I am going to start consistently using the name Cordova rather than Callback or PhoneGap for this project.

One of the team completed the demo code for the new Qt5 WebView that illustrates passing messages in both directions between the QML JavaScript and WebKit HTML/JavaScript environments. I also wrote a small C++ program to run it as a standalone program (basically a stripped down version of qmlscene). We noticed a dependency in QtWebKit on QWidgets. We're told that should be removed in the coming weeks. We're now working on the WebView implementation of our Cordova code.

I had a nice meeting with Anis Kadri at Adobe who works on Cordova and will be helping us on the project. We will be able to use his help on the non-Qt aspects of Cordova where we can really use his experience.

The Cordova repositories continue to be migrated to their new locations and just today the callback-qt repo on github was moved to https://github.com/cordova/cordova-qt. I understand that this will be a mirror of the official repository that should appear under http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf once it is set up.

The team also did some legal paperwork to submit ICCLAs to the Apache Foundation so we can get commit access to the repositories.

Finally, on the Raspberry Pi front, they have now announced some dates for when first build of boards will be out of manufacturing. Boards should be finished on February 20th and they should be taking orders from the Raspberry Pi website at the end of February. It has been a long time coming, and like many people, we are anxious to get our hands on some of the boards.

New Qt 5 / WebKIt 2 WebView APIs

(posted by Jeff Tranter)

There was no blog posting last week because I was away for some vacation in a warm place.

This week work continued implementing the APIs for Accelerometer and Notification and using the Qt Simulator for testing.

We also started looking at the new APIs needed to use WebKit2 from Qt 5. With Qt 5 and Webkit2 the APIs for QtWebKit and Web View are changing significantly. This is because with WebKit2, WebKit and the application run in different processes. The old QWebView widget will only be supported on Qt for desktops and won't use the new WebKit2. Mobile phone platforms typically won't have the QWidgets module installed in Qt 5. We want to use WebKit2 to leverage scene graph and other improvements in WebKit2.

If you build QtWebKit from git, the experimental support for communicating with the QML WebView element via messages is present. From QML you need to do:

    import QtQuick 2.0
    import QtWebKit 3.0
    import QtWebKit.experimental 3.0

I have been reading the earlier mailing list postings that describe the new messaging support and working on some QML and HTML proof of concept code that exercises the new messaging support. It runs under "qmlscene" and demonstrates how to send messages between QML and the Web View browser's JavaScript environment. This will let us explore if the new APIs will allow us to do what is needed to hook a QML Web View element up to the PhoneGap APIs we are implementing.

These references explain more:

1. http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/08/31/an-oldnew-approach-to-qtwebkit-hybrid/
2. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-qt/2011-October/001953.html
3. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-qt/2012-January/002394.html
4. https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-qt/2011-October/001943.html

Marketing Push

(posted by Jeff Tranter)

This week we did some marketing to promote the project. I made a posting to the callback developer mailing list and we put a link to this blog from the ICS web site. Quim Gil of Nokia kindly made a posting to the Nokia Qt blog. I also recorded a podcast with Mark Hatch for the ICS This Week in Qt podcast. All of this effort stimulated some good discussion on the blogs and callback developer mailing list.

Based on comments from some of the Qt 5 and WebKit developers, we will need to implement the Web View differently in Qt 5 since the QWebView widget will likely not be available on mobile devices in Qt 5, just on desktop. Possibly we could use a QML WebView element but the architecture is changing significantly with WebKit2 in Qt 5, particularly in the way that it will be exposed to JavaScript. I am having discussions with the relevant developers to come up with a strategy.

Meanwhile we're continuing to use the initial "quick and dirty" changes to the Qt 4 version of callback-qt that get it to compile with Qt 5. I'm hoping to get those changes committed this week. Work is progressing on the Compass and Accelerometer functions. I've been in touch with the Qt 4 PhoneGap developer Viras about working together and was pleased to hear that he also wants to help with the Qt 5 port.

We're hoping to get some Raspberry Pi boards around the end of the month. The first production build of 10,000 units is in progress and some are allocated to ICS. If you are interested in Raspberry Pi in general, you may want to follow the ICS Raspberry Pi blog.

Another Name Change

(posted by Jeff Tranter)

This week was another slow week as many people were off part of the week due to New Year's or extended holidays.

PhoneGap, recently renamed to Apache Callback, is now being renamed as Apache Cordova. There is discussion on the mailing list about where the code repositories will reside. It may be on github or the Apache git or both. There are also discussions on what Wiki to use. We're waiting for the dust to settle before we can commit any code changes.

On the Qt mailing list, release plans for Qt 5 are starting to shape up. To meet the goal of a release for this summer, the first milestone is a proposed feature freeze on Feb 4. There will be an alpha and one or more beta releases before final. This recent thread has more details.

This week our team continued with finishing Qt 5 and WebKit building and started looking at what is needed to support the PhoneGap Compass and Accelerometer APIs. They should be quite easy to map from the appropriate mobility APIs in Qt 5 (and Qt Mobility in Qt 4). We put a few tips and tricks that we found when building Qt 5 on our Wiki page.

Some good news is that Geolocation, Media, and Storage in PhoneGap are based on W3C HTML5 standards and these are supported in the latest WebKit so there shouldn't be much work needed here.

A response on the mailing list confirmed my investigation last week that the Qt Simulator will need significant work to run under Qt 5. A Lighthouse plugin sounds like the best approach but no one is known to be working on this yet. For testing we plan to make use of the Qt 4 Simulator and some real devices. We have been able to build the Qt 4 version of PhoneGap and run it on a MeeGo Harmattan-based Nokia N9 phone.

We have been considering the low-cost Raspberry Pi boards as one of the reference platforms for our work. This week ten of the first batch of beta hardware went up for auction on eBay as a fund-raiser for the non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation. Currently board number 1 is bidding at over US$3,000. I think I'll wait until the $35 production boards become available!