About time!

Qt on paper is an awesome framework for building cross-platform applications in C++. Yes, some people might question the need to reinvent the entire standard library or the need to butcher C++ syntax with a special pre-compiler, but no other C++ library/framework gives you so much bang for (zero) buck. There's a reason projects like QGIS are using Qt. It gives you the proverbial kitchen sink for building cross-platform applications.

So what's my problem?

Well for the longest time. For reasons unknown to me anyway, Qt on windows was built with wchar_t compiler support turned off, which has put off any plans of me exploring what Qt-based applications I can build with MapGuide/FDO or how to integrate MapGuide/FDO with other Qt-based applications (like QGIS). The entire source code of MapGuide and FDO revolves around this data type being actually supported, so if Qt has no idea about the strings I'm feeding it from MapGuide/FDO then we're going nowhere real fast.

The "workaround" for these versions of Qt was to basically rebuild the entire Qt stack with the wchar_t support enabled, which is a bit of a cop-out.

• Rebuilding Qt from scratch takes an eternity
• It means you now have to bundle custom Qt binaries instead of just plucking the matching dlls from the stock Qt SDK.
• It makes integration with other Qt-based applications difficult to impossible. Yes, try our cool MapGuide/FDO plugin for QGIS. All you have to do is completely replace your QGIS installation with our own custom build of QGIS, and break all your other QGIS plugins.

As already mentioned, this goes nowhere real fast. So such plans and ideas have been put on the back-burner ... until now.

So Qt recently reached 5.0. Given it's a new major release, I had to ask the wchar_t question again. I was so happy when I saw this:

That's right, a Qt application is receiving, converting and outputting wchar_t strings from FDO! Hurrah!

And if you're wondering: No this MapGuide/FDO plugin does not exist. It's just a theoretical plugin to drive through the point of how difficult it is currently to integrate MapGuide/FDO with Qt or any application built on top of Qt. I look forward to if/when QGIS does move to Qt 5.0. It'll make the possibility of integrating MapGuide/FDO with QGIS much simpler and if anything, more OSGeo projects should get along with each other more often.

And if you're also wondering: Am I resurrecting the semi-retired FDO Toolbox? Maybe :)