entry is an application created to allow rapid develop- and deployments of Qt based JavaScript applications, by leveraging the Qt binding for JavaScript/Go provided by therecipe/qt. It also acts as a showcase for these technologies and is the successor of the widgets_playground, which showcased the browser engine based Qt binding for JavaScript, as well as the "js" and "wasm" targets in general. This showcase now builds upon the widgets_playground showcase and extends it about the third binding for Qt provided by therecipe/qt, namely the QJSEngine based one which is now available for all targets supported by therecipe/qt if the used Qt version is >= 5.6
entry is also meant to lower the barrier to entry into the Qt ecosystem and was created to provide a more performant and traditional alternative to the current web based desktop/mobile development solutions in general. To lower the barrier to entry, the application develop- and deployments processes where simplified and it's now possible to instantly deploy to Windows, macOS and Linux with just the click of a button. (The web version also supports deployments to various additional targets). The development process was in so far simplified, that you can let entry live reload your application after source code changes. (This feature currently only supports state-less and local reloads, but it should be possible to extend it to state-full and remote reloads in the future as well). Beside the live reload feature, there are also TypeScript definition files provided, which can be used to type check your JavaScript code. The tsd_full dir contains the full JavaScript API available if you build entry yourself, while the tsd_minimal dir contains only the API that is available for the pre-built binaries at runtime.
entry itself is written mainly in JavaScript, but certain parts are still written in Go to showcase the interoperability between Go and JavaScript and how to fallback into Go code from JavaScript when using therecipe/qt. The JavaScript API of the Qt binding used by entry was modeled to match the Qt Go API of therecipe/qt as close as possible, which opens up the possibility to gradually move Qt JavaScript code to Qt Go code without much hassle.
On desktop/mobile systems, the QJSEngine is used to evaluate the JavaScript code, while on the web the JavaScript engine of your browser is used.
Some smaller standalone examples making use the of new desktop/mobile JavaScript binding, can also be found here.
To build this application, follow the general installation instructions for therecipe/qt which can be found here and also install bbe. Then either run qtdeploy as usual, or run the deploy.sh script to build entry for various targets.
Almost all Qt functions and classes are accessible from JavaScript and you should be able to find everything you need to build fully featured Qt applications in JavaScript, the feature-set shown in the in-build examples (and that is available at runtime) therefor only shows a small portion of all the features available. The same is true for the target platforms shown, since every target provided by therecipe/qt that supports Qt >= 5.6 should be supported, all of the targets listed here and all of the docker target images listed here should be supported as well. Which for example includes the Windows XP, Raspberry Pi (and similar "embedded" targets), as well as various Linux target variants and also the Android, iOS and SailfishOS target variants.
Some of the features used in this showcase will also find their way back into therecipe/qt in the future, such as the JS/QML live reloading feature. Another feature which was planned, but couldn't be finished in a timely manner was a declarative Qt Widgets module for QML, which will be added in the future as well.
Beside the general ported examples, there were also 5 of the 7GUIs tasks implemented and can be found here, the two missing tasks might be added in the future as well.
For general information about therecipe/qt, checkout: https://github.com/therecipe/qt
The Qt API Docs can be found here: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/classes.html
If you have questions, join our Slack channel #qt-binding (invite yourself here)
entry recognizes the following flags
-default-boot
start the application with the default boot payload
-edit
enable dev console (default true)
-load-boot string
load the boot payload from boot.js or the path specified
-load-payload string
load the payload from payload.js, payload.qml or the path specified
-patch-boot string
patch the boot payload from boot.js or the path specified
-patch-payload string
patch the payload from payload.js, payload.qml or the path specified
-reset-boot
resets the boot payload to a safe default
-save-boot string
save the boot payload to boot.js or the path specified
-save-payload string
save the payload to payload.js, payload.qml or the path specified
-skip-boot
skip the boot payload and load the main payload instead (works only with *.js files atm)
-watch-boot string
watch boot.js or the path specified for changes
-watch-payload string
watch payload.js, payload.qml or the path specified for changes
For Windows applications use ResEdit or the Resource Hacker. For macOS applications create an *.icns in the Contents/Resources dir of your *.app and edit the Info.plist similar to how it's explained here. For Linux applications take a look here.
(This will be improved in the future)