Plasma Active, Sailfish, and Ubuntu Phone Developers Discussing Common APIs

Jolla's Sailfish, Canonical's recently announced Ubuntu Phone, and KDE's Plasma Active environments are all using Qt5's QML for interface design. Unfortunately, the set of UI components provided by each, although similar, are incompatible with the others. After a chat on IRC between developers of all three platforms, they've decided to discuss the reasons behind each implementation, in the hopes that they can work toward a common architecture. "There are also discussions underway regarding other aspects of the bigger puzzle such as common package formats and delivery strategies. We are poised, should we keep our heads straight and our feet moving, to evolve that holiest of grails in the mobile space: an open and vendor neutral application development strategy built around the commonality of QtQuick and Linux. This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."

Comments

Visigoths

[girlintraining]

This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."

Rome died due to lead poisoning and excessive military expenditures. If we're going to become Rome, I suggest BSD instead -- their mascots are a bit more menacing than a penguin. Also, the licensing terms are less restrictive.

Re:Visigoths

[girlintraining]

Rome is still there. If you are speaking of the Roman empire, it existed for over a thousand years. A feat yet to be achieved.

The Caliphates that lived next door would dispute that. But I can understand ignoring Islamic achievements like that since Rome was the quintessential western empire and the Caliphates only spanned three continents and had a far greater population. It also lasted nearly twice as long as the Roman empire, which actually didn't last over a thousand years... since the empire kept fracturing and falling into chaos over that timeframe while the Caliphates remained largely stable... and existed until the last century (1924, if you need a year).

Re: Phone manufacturers won't like it

[bill_mcgonigle]

A common architecture would mean the phone manufactures couldn't keep their users locked to the platform where they have all their apps.

Which is why Android has been such a market failure.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

being that I have used Windows for ages and have used MANY different UI's... so saying using Windows is being forced into one UI is a very incorrect statement

This is why Windows will never be ready for the desktop, with its fragmented UI. Until all the developers working on different UIs for Windows standardize on a single UI it'll just never take off.