Going on the web with Qt

Sunday, 5 October 2008  |  Geiseri

So I have been working underground for a while on a web framework based on Qt but its gotten out of control and I need more help on it. The initial goal was to write a creole 1.0 compliant wiki based on Qt, but soon it grew into a full framework because of the lack of good C++ tools to do web development.

So far I have the following features working:

  1. Simple .UI to XHTML transformations.
  2. Basic form widget support ( line edits, selection boxes, buttons etc).
  3. Rudimentary DOM event to Qt slots working.
  4. Full bidirectional mapping of QVariantMaps to JSON objects.
  5. Creole 1.0 wiki parser that generates XHTML complaint XML
  6. All XHTML generated by the HTMLWidgets is XHTML strict valid.
  7. Works under IE 6-7, Firefox 2-3, and most webkit based browsers.

What is not working that I need help on:

  1. A better layout engine to handle transformations from the UI files better. There is an example at http://geiseri.no-ip.org:8080/cgi-bin/creole.cgi that shows im close but no cigar when it comes to layouts.
  2. More composite widgets to better convert Qt widgets like a date picker and a tab widget.
  3. More flexability in the Javascript to Qt signals.
  4. Examples
  5. And testing.

I have some demos of what I have so far on a home server so be gentle. http://geiseri.my-ip.org/cgi-bin/helloworld.cgi is a simple text edit that updates the UI via a Qt slot. http://geiseri.my-ip.org/cgi-bin/selections.cgi is an example of dynamically populating a selection box control via a Qt slot as well as form submission.

So if anyone is interested please sign up.

Also yes, I know about Wt, but I found out about it after I started the project and decided to keep going.