Jolla Sailfish SDK Detailed, Built on Qt and Mer SDK Tools

Following the official unveiling of its new Sailfish mobile operating system, Jolla detailed the Sailfish SDK today, offering more info on what developers need to know on the building of applications for the new platform.

Jolla’s Sailfish OS has been built on top of Mer project and Qt, while the modern interface it proposes to users was built with QML and QtQuick, designed to offer support for the standard QtMobility APIs. However, Jolla will continue to use the MeeGo API (via the Mer core), including Qt 4.7 [Qt47], Qt Mobility 1.0 [QtMob], and OpenGL ES 2.0 [OGLES]. The company also notes that the Sailfish SDK was built on the underlying Qt and Mer SDK tools. It is developed openly and the work is done in the Mer Project. The Sailfish SDK is lightly customized and sports a series of Sailfish components. “The Sailfish SDK consists of QtCreator, a virtualised Mer Platform SDK and Sailfish components,” the company notes. “Code is developed in Qt-Creator on the host device; then, through shared storage, the code is passed to the virtualised Mer SDK where it compiles inside the Virtual Machine.”

Those who would like to learn more on the Sailfish SDK will have to go to this page on the platform’s wiki for info on how to build their own copy of QtCreator. The underlying source code can be found on this webpage. “It's early days for building applications on Sailfish OS; at the moment you have to build your own copy of QtCreator and then work with the people in #mer and #nemomobile on irc,” Jolla explains. The company also notes that they are using Qt with the Sailfish UI components and that QtCreator plugins will soon become available for download for other people to take advantage of as well. The developer kit is self-contained with no user-data. Its being produced in the SDK allows people to build their own flavor of the kit.

“You get all the power of a complete OS in an SDK (eg we're running a small web application framework to permit SDK management and this allows other interesting features too),” Jolla continues.

Sailfish OS on Nokia N950
Image to MTV 3 Finland

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