Generic Component Framework - A Qt based component framework

Speaker: Prashanth Udupa

Software applications today are born large and grow even larger. Many a times solutions developed for one project may be used as-is or with slight modification in another project. It is hence important to adopt a type of software architecture that helps manage the growth of the project and fosters software reuse. One such useful architecture is - “Component Architecture”. Component architecture forces developers to think of their applications as a collection of decoupled, independent entities called components. A component-architecture-aware framework helps in assembling a set of components into an application. KDE already has a fantastic GUI component framework called KParts, which is exhaustive, neat, well tested and widely used. In this talk the speaker will introduce to the audience - a new, light-weight, award-winning (QtCentre Programming Contest 2007) Qt based component framework called GCF (Generic Component Framework). GCF solves a whole lot of problems faced in component based software 1. Loading (UI and non-UI) components from shared libraries 2. GUI Merging and component configuration 3. Component / Object discovery 4. Inter-component communication and dependencies 5. IPC – Communication between objects across application and system boundaries