Colleague Shantanu Tushar published a blog entry on Qt, QML and a company called V-Play. A number of us have been talking to the people at V-Play, and are impressed with their product and patronage of Qt technologies for profit. Shantanu has been promoting Qt technologies for years, and it was easy for him to pick up some V-play tutorials, and try things for himself.

V-Play have pioneered cross-platform development using Qt & QML for games. ThoughtWorks is more into business app development, but there is plenty to the technology generally, and V-play’s explanations/documentation of it that would keep you on their site.

Shantanu’s blog entry entry: Playing with V-Play and QML

The blog posting is perhaps no more than three minutes of your time. Shantanu goes through a few of the V-Play example apps, and why QML is relevant.

Flappy Bird example

Interestingly, one of the examples that V-play made that Shantanu calls out is a flappy bird one that deploys to iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS X. A week ago some fullstackedu.com developers made a Flappy bird game in Swift (iOS and maybe Mac only for now). I’ve looked at the source for both, and the QML one is much more pleasant on the eye. I’ve not done an in-depth LOC comparison (which I think is one success metric), assuming that there are equal features between the two.

Multi-platform

From the V-play website:

V-Play games can be deployed to Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10, Symbian, MeeGo, Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux. Blackberry Playbook/10 and Windows Phone 8 are also high priorities for us.

I think this is compelling messaging for the V-Play people. Dropbox are known to have switched to C++ for Android and iOS development (I suspect in one trunk, but that’s a different story). Sure, QML is mostly about markup, but there’s a JavaScript turing-complete language in there too, if you didn’t want to drop to C++ (and others?) for functionality.

Thanks

Our impromptu Qt interest group inside ThoughtWorks had reached out to Christian Feldbacher who is CEO and co-founder of V-Play to go deeper into their services, components and examples. We are very appreciative of the time he spent with us on a video call. Thanks dude - as I said on the phone your site, documentation, clarity and approach to teaching the technologies is an order better than that of the base Qt community.

Incidentally and embarrassingly after a number of years being a fan, I learned two more things during the call:

1. QT is pronounced “Cutie” not “Cue Tee”
2. QML stands for “Qt Meta Language” not “QT Markup Language”

Shantanu has a follow up coming, which I’ll link to soon :)