QtCS2021 - Plugin-based I/O

Session Summary

QML and Qt Quick have some ad-hoc QNetworkRequest code for fetching qml files and image files from web servers, but it seems a bit short-sighted that this is not done on top of some abstraction for reading files from various kinds of sources. (PDF files are rendered via Image, with this being one reason: to reuse that code rather that duplicating it. QTextDocument should support network loading too: that way it will become possible to load QML Text from a URL, or in widget apps with QTextBrowser, etc.) Http will not always be enough: the distributed web is an up-and-coming concept, and there have always been other protocols for fetching files and assets. Maybe we want to allow loading remote assets in QtQuick3D too, etc. Currently KIO is nicely extensible, but it's not built-in to Qt, and the architecture that requires a separate process for each operation is not ideal. What should we do about it? Another aspect of this is that we should probably have an I/O API in QML eventually; and it should probably follow good asynchronous design principles, and look familiar to Javascript developers. Hopefully it could be built upon the same I/O layer. Therefore we should design the new abstraction to be suitable for that.

Session Owners

• Shawn Rutledge (shawn.rutledge@qt.io)