Flipping through an old notebook, I came across my notes on BlackBerry Cascades from BlackBerry DevCon 2011. This was half a year before the framework was released, and a good year and a half before the launch of BlackBerry 10. Since then I have become an expert at Cascades, but it is interesting to see some of my earlier thoughts.
- 2D and 3D
- 90% of UI could be lists
- QML declarative UI from Qt
- Asynchronous to help rendering rate
- Signals to handle events
- List Types – (SQL,XML,JSON)
- Uses BBX IDE
- QML looks nicer than C++
- Beta in fall (November)
- Everything in BBX is Qt
Somethings I got right, and with some others I look a little silly. For example Cascades has no support for 3D. In fact Cascades is actively bad at working in three dimensions and doesn’t even support giving z-values to elements. Also the beta wasn’t launched in November (at the time only a month away), but instead the next May. The emphasis on lists was a bit overblown. Creating 90% of an app out of lists can be true for pretty much any framework, and somewhat ironically I don’t actually use a ListView for creating the lists in most of my apps anyhow. The one thing that was apparent to me from the very beginning is that QML is far nicer than C/C++ ever was…