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> For starters, it's overly verbose. If you've worked with stuff like XAML in WPF or XML layouts on Android, you know how quickly those files tend to get bloate

> For starters, it's overly verbose. If you've worked with stuff like XAML in WPF or XML layouts on Android, you know how quickly those files tend to get bloated. I've done a bit of WPF and a fair amount of Qt Widgets, and never once did the actual XML content matter since it was mostly putting the control at a place that looks good in a UI designer. > Which leads to more bloat. I'd like to know your definition of "bloat".It's not like 100kb or 500kb of XML are going to translate into 100kb or 500kb executables or runtime memory use, since the XML is generally only used at compile time before translation into code. > Editing XML kind of sucks. You're more at risk of making silly typos that won't be caught at compile time. well, Qt's main IDE marks the UI xml files as read-only so not much chance of that on that side. > At some point you will need to access your user interface from your application code. Which means you end up with silly stuff like findViewById() to bridge the gap, adding even more boilerplate to your code. ... no, you will just refer directly to a variable that was generated in a precompilation pass - you can inherit from or compose the generated object depending on if you prefer to type `ui->myLabel.setText` or `this->myLabel.setText`. > You essentially have to learn two different sets of APIs which do the same thing. <Button title="blah"/> vs button.setTitle("blah"). Why? You don't if you just use the UI designer.

jacoblambda 7y ago
Chiming with my prior experience: My problem with Qt's approach is that their editor is atrocious despite their XML schema for UI layout being excellent. Qt's XML schema makes sense and very easily translates to the C++ it generates. If one wishes they can write the XML themself using just their knowledge of the Qt Property System, the Layout System, and the very basics of how the XML is laid out. If they want to just use a designer tool, that's fine too however Qt's UI designer makes life very difficult from the perspective of version control and actual usability. The UI designer doesn't respect any Canonical form of the UI files. This means that each time you save the file it more or less jumbles the entire thing up based on however it decided to hold it in memory. This turns tiny changes (what should be maybe 2-3 lines of XML) into massive ones (100s to 1000s of lines of XML shuffled just enough to shake off any semblance of contiguous history in the VCS). Likewise, it adds arbitrary property data to items that 95/100 times are unintended (setting default geometry sizes based on the sizes of the UI elements in the demo window) or are simply meaningless (storing the default value as a user selected property despite the user requesting to use the default). It doesn't help that the UI of the designer is finicky as hell (layouts) and adding custom UI components is a hassle via the editor while it is exceedingly easy in the XML. It's a bunch of small things like that that have resulted in teams I've worked on in the past refusing or at least strongly discouraging the committing of changes made by UI designer into VCS. It's really a shame too since a good UI editor is a boon for development and Qt has a really nice UI library.

jacoblambda 7y ago

Chiming with my prior experience: My problem with Qt's approach is that their editor is atrocious despite their XML schema for UI layout being excellent. Qt's XML schema makes sense and very easily translates to the C++ it generates. If one wishes they can write the XML themself using just their knowledge of the Qt Property System, the Layout System, and the very basics of how the XML is laid out. If they want to just use a designer tool, that's fine too however Qt's UI designer makes life very difficult from the perspective of version control and actual usability. The UI designer doesn't respect any Canonical form of the UI files. This means that each time you save the file it more or less jumbles the entire thing up based on however it decided to hold it in memory. This turns tiny changes (what should be maybe 2-3 lines of XML) into massive ones (100s to 1000s of lines of XML shuffled just enough to shake off any semblance of contiguous history in the VCS). Likewise, it adds arbitrary property data to items that 95/100 times are unintended (setting default geometry sizes based on the sizes of the UI elements in the demo window) or are simply meaningless (storing the default value as a user selected property despite the user requesting to use the default). It doesn't help that the UI of the designer is finicky as hell (layouts) and adding custom UI components is a hassle via the editor while it is exceedingly easy in the XML. It's a bunch of small things like that that have resulted in teams I've worked on in the past refusing or at least strongly discouraging the committing of changes made by UI designer into VCS. It's really a shame too since a good UI editor is a boon for development and Qt has a really nice UI library.