I am a developer and am fairly comfortable with Qt. However, I am having trouble understanding the various frameworks and codenames being thrown about so will be grateful for some clarification.

From an API point of view, what are the differences between "real" Meego, Meego/Harmattan and Symbian? My understanding is as follows:

1. You can write Qt 4.6 applications and deploy them on all the platforms.

2. Qt 4.7 and Qt mobility will also be supported everywhere. Qt 4.7 will become available to Symbian in the future while Meego devices will come with 4.7 pre-installed.

3. Meego Touch framework (libmeegotouch) is where things start to become hazy. Will Meego Touch be supported on Symbian? If so, will it be part of firmwares or distributable with smartinstaller or do I have to manually compile and package it with application?


4. Will Meego Touch framework be available on Meego/Harmattan?

5. Symbian folks are developing "Orbit" about which I know nothing but it is supposedly an extended widget set built on top of Qt and will be available for Symbian^4. What platforms will Orbit be available on? Will it work on Symbian^1, Symbian^3, Maemo, Meego/Harmattan, Meego etc etc?

I just posted the same questions on Forum Nokia as well. If I get any info from there, will post here too. Of course, your answers will still be much appreciated

I doubt meegotouch will be available on Symbian, its too Meego-oriented.
As Nokia devs said, use Qt4.7 for all and Meegotouch for meego.
Qt4.7 and QtQuick will be available on n900 with PR1.3

MTF is supported in Harmattan and "real" MeeGo. Orbit is not, it's for Symbian4.

You could develop community ports of both MTF and Orbit for any device if you wanted, but if you want a "supported" cross platform experience, look at Qt Quick.

QWidgets ("plain old Qt") will work, but will have "secondary" status compared to MTF (MeeGo), Orbit (Symbian 4) and especially Qt Quick (both).

Rest assured that Qt Quick is the future. There are various valid reasons to use something else today (e.g. the fact that Qt Components is still alpha), but if you are thinking long term & multiplatform, that's the way to go.

Thanks vivainio and sharky76!

As you work with Qt Quick, be aware that there is a project call qt-components, that provides native-like elements to Qt Quick. This is not ready for release yet, but it shows the direction Qt is going.

Thanks. Yes I found its git repository yesterday and will take a look.

In related news..

I could use some clarification on what purpose each of these components serve. I have a rough idea what Qt Quick is, and I understand Qt Components will be a set of ready made widgets for use with Qt Quick. Am I still on the right track?

Is Qt Components a separate development from MTF widgets or Orbit widgets? Does Qt Components use MTF on MeeGo for example, or are they separate and QtC just tries to adapt to the look/behaviour of "native" MTF widgets?

I am under the impression that both Orbit and MTF are more than just widget sets. At least MTF seems to include a window manager, an input method framework, the system UI, homescreen, etc. and I assume Orbit is no different here. Are these something that Qt Components will address at some point? And if Orbit is entirely dropped, what will be used on Symbian side for these purposes? Or does it just mean that they'll use parts of Orbit, but create the actual application UIs with Qt Quick?

Qt Quick Components adapts to MTF look and feel by reusing theming code from MTF. That is, there is a binary dependency to MTF.

What they will do is not (IIUC) public information yet.

However, the general trend is clear - Qt Quick throughout the stack.

Orbit is dead now. Less confusion