While Qt offers many many nice features which make Objective-C look like from stone age. Objective-C has some nice features as well, one I mentioned in my previous post, which Qt already solves rather nicely and in a better way as one of the commenter pointed out. Objective-C and Qt are quite similar in a sense that they provide improvements on top of an already existing language. Qt with meta object compiler and Obj-C with something similar.

So back to the point, I now use Q_PROPERTY macro in my QObjects based classes a lot:

class Person : public QObject
{
Q_OBJECT
Q_PROPERTY(QString name READ name WRITE setName)

public:
void setName(const QString& aName) { iName = aName; }
QString name() const { return iName; }

private:
QString iName;
};

Now consider this Objective-C code:

// person.h
@interface Person : NSObject
{
NSString* name;
}
@property (nonatomic, retain) NSString* name; // same as Q_OBJECT 

// person.m:
@implementation Person
@synthesize name; // this generates getter/setter in the .m file

// rest of the code ...

So do you see what I see ? In the Objective-C version of the code I don't have to write the getter and setter methods, whereas in Qt i have to. I think all the information to automatically implement the getter and setter functions is already in the Q_PROPERTY macro, may be the moc compiler can go ahead and also generate the getter and setter methods for us ?

Some people are comparing this with the Window Phone 7 Series and how its limited to .NET and C#, well that’s not exactly the same thing, Windows Phone 7 has no market share as of now, it will be coming to market in the late 2010. Microsoft sets this standard before they have any kind of market share, and besides any language ( php, vb, python ) can be used to create CLR code and that can be used for making apps on wp7 ( yet ).

But I believe apple has every right to do what it is doing. It might be good for the company, but sad for most of the developers. I myself was looking at monotouch as a tool for doing apps for iphone, but I went with objective c instead, it was not that difficult to learn and I think if you are a good c++ programmer objective c would be a piece of cake to learn, in two or three days. Monothouch is also just too expensive in my opinion.

However, like google has said earlier and I believe it myself that webapps are the future way of doing apps. Phonegap for example is an awesome project and it has a lot of potential, what we need now is standardization of web apps / javascripts apis. W3C for example has now standardized the Geolocation api, I think we need similar standard apis for example to access the phone book, sensors etc ….

Consider this objective c code for a class declaration:

// .h file:
@interface classname {
// instance variables
}
+(void)classMethod;
@end

// .m file:
@implementation classname
-privateFunction1{}
-classMethod { [self privateFunction1]; }
@end


While if you would have to do something similar in c++, this is how you would do it:


// .h file:
class classname
{
public:
void classMethod();

Even if a function in a C++ class is private, you still have to declare it in the class declaration. why ?
It would be so much better if all the private functions can just placed in the cpp file, and we dont have to put them in the class declaration.

Objective C has the benefit of using @implementation … @end to figure out such methods. But if in c++ if we just declare a function in the .cpp file and such function is not present in the class declaration, the compiler can know that its a private function. Like so:


// .h file: