[bt-devel] KDE4, Qt4, and Windows porting... plus DCOP

[Joachim Ansorg]

Hi all,

I spent some time to do a Qt4 based testing application. It uses Qt4 only and 
is able to show Sword's Bible modules, to navigate in them using a tree 
structure and to display text in chapters (using Sword's HTML filters).
It's just a small app for testing Qt4 and ideas we have for a version 2.0.
I implemented beginnings of an user interface I'd like to have in BT. Don't 
know if that is useful. I also did a cleaner separation of the backend (if we 
can say that in such an early state of development).

You can download the tgz file at 
http://www.bibletime.info/download/bibletime-testing-qt4.tgz.
A screenshot is available at
http://www.bibletime.info/download/bt-testing-qt4.jpg

I don't have a Windoes available here atm, so I can't test if it compiles 
under Windows. Does anybody have experience with this?

I think Qt4 has been improved a lot but it will be really difficult to port BT 
1.x to Qt4 and doing refactoring and restructuring at the same time for 2.0.

If we do a port we need to decide:
 a) A completely new BibleTime application based on Qt4 only (+ KHTML)
 b) A ported 1.5 app which uses Qt4's Qt3 compatibility layer and some KDE 
widgets (+KHTML)

a)'s disadvantage is that it this involves a lot of work but has the advantage 
of a better software design. BibleTime's current design isn't well done 
(blame me :)

b)'s disadvantage is that this requires a stable KDE 4pre (a lot of time) and 
it will probably a large app because we use KDE stuff. The advantage is that 
we can do the actual development in a shorter time. But we can't change the 
interface to something better.

I don't know that the right thing is, atm.

I'd love to see how big this app would be as an Windows exe using mingw.

Joachim