dave linenberg wrote “Troll Tech last night released a beta of QSA, which stands for QT Scripting Language for Applications (download here). As a business apps developer for a major financial institution’s trading floor, I know the traders will love this. Hopefully, with QSA, I can get rid of Excel, and give the traders Spreadsheet widgets, with the flexibility of “VBA-like” scriptability to boot!”
Troll Tech (QT) Releases Beta of Scripting Language (QSA)
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Brilliant news. QT gets better all of the time. The benefits of software being backed by a company. Bit like Ximian with Gnome.
That guy/girl can’t get rid of Excel because QSA is for Qt apps, and the only two Qt spreadsheet apps I know is KSpread and Hancom, neither which, in my humble opinion, can replace Excel. Maybe Hancom, but certainly not KSpread (lack of Excel export support is a real drawback).
If there’s one thing we really need, it’s another custom scripting language.
People sure love reinventing that ol’ wheel…
If we never reinvented the wheel, we all be stuck to a rough wheel made out of stone in Sumeria.
From the Trolltech website:
“The language of Qt Script for Applications is Qt Script, an implementation of a subset of ECMAScript 4.0. ECMAScript is also called JavaScript or JScript by some vendors.
“Qt Script provides the language features of ECMAScript, for example, while loops, class and function definitions, etc. Qt Script also provides access to most of the functionality provided by the Qt C++ class library. Qt provides a rich set of cross-platform GUI widgets, OpenGL support, collection classes, database support, etc. The separate Library Reference describes the comprehensive library functionality.”
http://doc.trolltech.com/qsa/language-1.html
I don’t think you can honestly say that this is “yet another scripting language”.
It is basically a javascript subset with access to Qt functionality.
I’d say that this capitalises very well on existing skills in the market and does not constitute as reinventing the wheel.
Baldur.
Isn’t Excel the wheel we are talking about reinventing here? I see nothinging about this announcement that is bad in any way. If we can get yet another Excel alternative that works I’m sure someone somewhere will benefit and make good use of it. Who knows maybe one day it’ll all be integrated with Mono so we can script just about any application in whatever scripting language we want. That is the beauty of open source, IMO.
Trolltech has IMHO raised the bar in terms of Quality GUI toolkits and with the latest release it would appear that they have no intention of slowing down. I have also heard rumors that SciTech is readying a version Of SciTech SNAP Graphics for QT. Does anyone else have additional information about this.
The Konqueror team developed a JavaScript implementation so I don´t see the benefit of this
The alternative is, of course, to use DCOP interfaces.
>The alternative is, of course, to use DCOP interfaces.
Not really, DCOP is far to intergrated with KDE for that.
There is (much) more to Qt than KDE.
that would be oh so nice 🙂
I don’t see how this is an alternative to excel. Isn’t this a scripting lanugage to use to write the event handlers (slots) or to use as a scripting language in a Qt application. I agree that this isn’t a new scripting language, but I would rather have a language like Python. It is rather similar to javascript – an OO scripting language. But Python has a gaggle of great libraries to complment Qt. NumPy is a great way to give quantitative analysists some real number crunching, for example.
BTY, there is a GREAT gui designer for Qt. Get your hands on Qt-Designer. It’s a ‘drag n’ drop’ tool in the tradition of VB or Delphi. But the visual tools to ‘wire up’ the signals and slots is a lot of fun. You can work out a lot of the basics without writing a lick of code. You can make an interative prototype quite quickly.
Qt-Designer builds an XML description of the GUI. Based upon this, you can generate base classes in C++ (or Python if you get BlackAdder from The Kompany). It looks like you can also use QSA to write event handlers. This will be a pretty impressive RAD tool.
“The Konqueror team developed a JavaScript implementation so I don´t see the benefit of this”
Try to use Konquis’ ECMA script engine as a replacement for QT script and you’ll see. Those two are very different.
Actually using KJS as a replacement for QAS is easy. I wrote a wrapper library called KJSEmbed which offers pretty much the same functionality, you can get it from the kdebindings module of the KDE cvs.
Rich.
rajan: don’t worry, we’re still working on that.