Hello all,

I'm looking to get started writing KDE apps. and KDE apps that talk to databases (MySQL, Oracle, others). I'm coming from a windows background but I will be using KDE in Linux. I have Kubuntu 12.04 installed and KDevelop. However, I'm having trouble finding the GUI components in the IDE such as: text boxes, buttons, list boxes, database connection/table/query, etc. I've used Visual Studio and Borland's products (several light years ago when Borland was Borland and then Inprise) so, I was expecting to find some sort of component pallet where components could be dragged and dropped onto a GUI form and then manipulated in property editor and in code. Please forgive me if my expectations were way off. Are there any tutorials for the stuff I'm looking for? Also, can anyone recommend a good book or two for KDE development?

Edit: Also, what is the difference between Qt Creator and KDevelop? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Hi,

KDevelop doesn't have a visual GUI editor. You can, however, use QtDesigner to create the UI files and then write code for them in KDevelop. Note that QtDesigner is not the same as QtCreator, the latter being another IDE, the former being a (standalone) visual GUI editor for Qt. You can launch QtDesigner by running the "designer" command, and use uic / uic4 to translate the .ui files it creates to C++ code. Usually you'll want to do that through CMake, but for seeing how it works running uic on a .ui file manually might be interesting.

KDevelop and QtCreator are just two different IDEs. Try them and decide which one you like better. I obviously recommend KDevelop.

Here's information on KDE development: http://techbase.kde.org/Development

Greetings,
Sven

Thanks Scummos. I wasn't able to find anything about doing database development with KDevelop4 at the link you provided. Is there a class hierarchy/class library specific to KDE built on top of Qt? Are there any books or web resources where I can inspect the class hierarchy/class library? Any books for KDE 4.x development in general (pdf, html, or paper)? I'm not concerned with doing cross-platform development right now (I can get my hands on some version of an m$ product for windows if I wanted to) so I'll focus on C++ Linux/KDE 4.x development for now. I'll have to test out Qt Designer... thanks for the tip.

Hi,

unless you explicitly do it wrong by using system() for everything or so, your Qt / KDE applications will be more or less cross-platform anyways. So there's no need to worry about that too much.

For general documentation on KDE stuff, see KDE techbase (more exactly, api.kde.org); for general documentation on Qt, see qt-project.org. You'll need both resources, depending on what class you're trying to get information about.

For accessing SQL databases with Qt, see http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qtsql.html. There isn't really anything special about database development "with KDevelop", I don't think it has many special features in that area. I think there's a SQL plugin for the text editor, but I'm not even sure what it does exactly.

Greetings,
Sven

Thanks again scummos. I'll take a look at the info at the link you provided.