I see that 6.6 is scheduled to be out on 28 Feb and I am also hearing that Photon is no longer supported.
We have invested heavily on our HMI using Photon and this is a big deal to us. Anyone else feel this way? What do you think QNX will provide for companies in this situation? I hope Photon can still be made to run on 6.6 but just not supported.
I would like to hear what the community thinks about this?
thanks
That was annonced a while back, that photon would be dropped amongts other things. Not the first time they do this. Same happened with QWindows a while back. They are reacting to the market and are going were the money is, while leaving long time smaller customer behing. Ive been though that before, hence Im basically not relying on any specifc QNX stuff as much as possible or without knwoing there is a way to accomplish the equivalent with other OS. We need to do that because our product is constantly evolving and everytime something like that happened it hinder our ability to compete. We`ve got better thing to do than write apps because QNX pulls the rug under our feed.
That being said 6.6 is binary compatible with 6.5 so you should be able to run photon on it.
I work with a number of customers who like you are heavily invested in Photon. I’ve spoken with various individuals at QNX about this. At one point I volunteered to take over support of Photon, but I never received an answer.
A related issue for me is the development environment. I’ve been developing with QNX self hosted back to version 1.0. I think it is one of QNX’s best features. I’ve been told that there will be a way to continue doing this, just not supported. I’m waiting to see whether 6.6 comes with a QNX compiled compiler.
I personally liked developing Phab from self hosted because it just felt right but going back and forth between windows (momentics) and QNX (phab) was a bit clunky so we’ve moved away from that but sounds like that might be our only alternative if we move to 6.6?
The company (QNX) line seems to be, port to Qt or stay on 6.5 forever. I hope that’s not the only alternative. We’ll know more about self hosting possibilities on Monday. There was a rumor that a windowing system based on Qt might be ported. That would at least preserve self hosting.
Photon source is available, under condition of course.
If I was to guess the next thing to go is qnet.
From the release notes:
“We no longer ship a self-hosted version of QNX SDP (that is, you can lo longer use the QNX Neutrino RTOS itself to develop programs). We also no longer ship a bootable x86 CD.”
I hope they don`t drop x86 in the future.
Crap.
KDAB has, with support from QNX, developed a migration framework to move Photon applications over to Qt. Many Photon API calls continue to work, PhAB applications can be moved over to Qt Creator’s Designer. Everyone should at least talk to them to find out what’s possible.
Will QNX reemburse the cost of the forced migration ?
QNX has supported Photon for… how long? 15 years? 20 years? Come on, give those guys a break.
Well, let’s see. It hasn’t really been supported for quite a while. I’d say something like 5 years. Tolerated might be a better word. But really, I have no problem with them dropping Photon if they were to replace it with something equivalent. Qt is not equivalent. But they are also not killing the self hosted environment. I guess you could just as well say, … but they’ve provided that for almost 30 years. Yeah, and it’s a good feature. At least it was. It’s such a good feature, that they are continuing to provide it internally. Honestly, I’d rather go back to switching text consoles like QNX 2 than have to use Momentics exclusively.
Just installed the development tools on windows and vmware image of 6.6.0 on x86 and I must say that I am pretty disappointed that QNX just booted to a terminal screen. I was hoping QNX would have replaced Photon with at least some QT version of UI, or anything else. I know SCREEN is capable of running QT, OpenGL, HTML5 etc… but I would have to do bunch of research at this point to get that working and I can’t even find a good documentation which QNX is usually good about. To me 6.6.0 is a transitional version which is not well integrated with the development tools. I’ll just stay with 6.5.1 for now.
jinma,
I guess you haven't been noticing my posts these last few months. I hope I'm not rubbing anyone the wrong way at QNX, but I have been ranting and raving about this for a while. As best I can tell, the only solution for developers is to use Momentics, either on Windows or Linux to cross develop target systems. Repeating myself, I think this is a giant step backwards. One irony I've run into is that there doesn't seem to be any straight forward way to create a QNX target file system from Momentics. The work arounds include using the downloadable VM target system for this purpose, or maybe creating a bootable DOS file system with QNX on it, with enough tools to create a QNX file system. Very non-intuitive from my point of view.
Mitchell
Same here. Big disappointment. I can only guess the reasoning behind this. Qt is not a QNX product, and for those who want Crank or HTML5 it’s useless overhead. But still… I think the right thing to do would have been to come up with a homescreen, just like on BB10, IMHO. That would have been nice.
I’m very annoyed by this aswell. Basically it’s a lot of manual work. The advantage is that you 100%ly know what’s in your filesystem. But I never understood why Momentics lacked such tooling.
Lots of think I`m not talking about so I am giving them a break Should here their reponse when I asked them how about Phindows like capability…
That being said Im sure QNX is well aware of the effect this will have on customer and its a consious and deliberated choice. One might just skip 6.6 and wait for 6.7 but at 3 years between releases that’s a long time to wait for thinks like updated compiler and such. Plus given the expensive support plan to get the access to updated that 6.7 ( 6years of paying for support plan) is going to be mighty expensive.
I was out of openqnx for a while and missed your postings. I will read back to catch up now, but I agree with you about lack of coherency with QNX development tool at this point 
I agree with you 100% Mario. QT use to support VNC server but that was back in 4.x days and now I don’t even know what kind of remote login tools QT5 has if not any. Being able to remote login and control from a GUI side is a huge tool to have for support and troubleshooting. I will not go backward with ssh or telnet at best.
A small note from the trenches. The VM version comes without QED. Maybe I’m the last person using it. Well me and Dan, anyway. But I quickly found that the QNX 6.5 version works quite well.
It does not have a compiler, no surprise here. I poked around with trying to run gf and Photon on it. I only ran into a problem late in the game having to do with the font manager. I’ll try again some more later in the week.
Mitchell