The relationship between Cascades™ and Qt: Stakes and Opportunities for Blackberry Developers


The respond to this question come from Eun-Kyung and Kizito of Blackberry
Here is what they tell us :

Cascades and Qt frameworks are two major frameworks available in BlackBerry 10 application development. From a high-level architectural point of view, you can say that Cascades sits on top of Qt modules as it is built, using the Qt application framework leveraging Qt object model, event model and threading model. This also uses QtCore, QtXML, QtSql, QtNetwork and QDeclarativeEngine for QML components. Both frameworks use standard C++, signals and slots in Qt for inter-object communication. However, Cascades uses own UI rendering engine and does NOT use any QtGui functionality, while Qt uses raster and the OpenGL graphics engine.

The key point here is that BlackBerry 10 supports BOTH Cascades and Qt frameworks. If you have developed an application using Qt framework for other platforms, you can deploy and run the application on BlackBerry 10 with the minimum effort of fixing a few compile and runtime issues. The downside of this approach is that your application may not have consistent look and feel with the BlackBerry 10 platform, nor have the best integration with the platform itself.

Cascades includes a set of core UI components and platform APIs to create interactive applications accessing the underlying features of the BlackBerry 10 platform. Cascades UI components are designed to have a consistent look and feel, and are optimized for BlackBerry 10 integration such as touch screen interactions. You can use Cascades Builder, the main development tool, for creating BlackBerry Native applications, which is built into the QNX Momentics IDE. The UI preview and the components view are specific features of Cascades Builder when editing QML. Cascades Builder is also integrated to access the BlackBerry platform features and services like audio/video, camera, Ad Service, app integration, BBM™ Social Platform, external data storage access, file system access, internationalization, location, payment service, PIM (Personal Information Management), push services, networking, notifications and sensors. To learn more about the Cascades framework, see Introduction to Cascades.

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