PhoneGap for Qt 5 Project Kickoff

This week we kicked off the PhoneGap for Qt 5 project.

The goal of the project is to develop a complete version of the PhoneGap open source mobile development framework for the Qt 5 platform. This is going to be an exciting project and we hope it will help accelerate the adoption of Qt 5, making it easy to run HTML5 applications on devices that run Qt 5.

This week we focused on some startup tasks. We assembled the project team at ICS, with a mix of people with Qt and web development experience. We joined the PhoneGap developer mailing list. I put some information on the Wiki page for the project. We looked at and ran the code for the existing incomplete Qt 4 (mostly for Symbian) version of PhoneGap. The existing code has not been touched for almost a year. As luck would have it, this week an open source developer appeared with an almost complete rewrite of the Qt 4 version of PhoneGap! We plan to leverage this new version. We are hoping it will be feasible to use the same code base for Qt 4 and Qt 5 versions (with #ifdefs or similar, as needed to accommodate differences, or possibly a branch of the same code). The team also checked out and built the latest Qt 5 code from gitorious.org (it's huge!) so we can evaluate what is needed to port the Qt 4 version of PhoneGap to run with Qt 5.

Stay tuned. We plan to report on our progress here on at least a weekly basis. If you are interested in contributing to this project, feel free to contact me.