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LoCO is a set of C++ classes that make it easy to create command-line and GUI applications with any language that compiles to JavaScript. JavaScript is used to glue together binary components, optionally loaded at run-time, developed in C++. Objects are connected through signals/slots or by direct reference through a QObject pointer, giving to the objects the responsibility to check the interface semantics or the object type. Note that with Qt it is possible to perform duck-typing with C++: only check if a property or method is available, not if an object is of a specific type.

A goal I've had for quite some time is to build desktop applications with standard JavaScript libraries such as Knockout, jQuery(UI) and others; LoCO makes this possible through bindings for WebKit which is intended to be the main toolkit for developing GUI applications, including HUD type of interfaces on top of OpenGL/OpenSceneGraph.

A minimal number of native UI widgets is supported mainly to access system dialogs and some non-standard(across operating systems) controls such as the MacOS drawer and top menu bar.

Have a look at the provided locoplay application to get a feeling of what it takes to create a basic LoCO-based application which executes scripts within a custom taylored JavaScript environment. Also have a look at the cmake configuration file to learn how to bundle all the scripts and resources in a single file.

Scripts that work with locoplay

Note that there is no plan to support any mobile platform at this time since after experimenting with different solutions, and having worked for a few years in mobile development I believe there is no need of such a toolkit for mobile platforms thanks to their (now) polished and feature rich APIs and the availability of platforms such as PhoneGap, Appcelerator, Xamarin and others.

FYI the use cases I'm looking at are:

• quickly develop small GUI applications and command line tools with CoffeeScript/JavaScript
• visualization/analysis applications for scientific data
• develop CAD/3D content creation apps
• experiments with image processing/computer vision
• GUIs for tweaking/configuring/steering experimental scientific applications developed in CUDA, OpenCL and MPI
• interface to hardware devices(e.g. Arduino) and access to audio/video input/output ports

The end goal is in general to create working prototypes of any kind as fast as possible through mashups of pre-existing modules.

Additional information is available on the official LoCO website and on the wiki.

To get an idea of the requirements I looked at when I designed LoCO have a look at the Specification page.

Developer's guide is in the making. Some design documents and accompanying UML diagrams created with the great yUML tool will be made available as well.

This GitHub project is used to support research, design and development and it is subject to frequent changes, also acting as a scratchpad.

Once things such as documentation and tutorials become stable they are moved to the official user-facing LoCO website.

###QtWebKit status update

After experimenting with the latest 5.x and 4.8.5 versions I decided to keep on supporting only Qt 4.8.x until the new WebEngine is released and support for the QObject bridge added, which means that the first 5.x version supported by LoCO should be 5.3.x (where x > 0). Given the current release schedule and plans it means that support for Qt 5 should start to be available around mid 2014.