Business justification

Today embedded market is already looking into develop containerized applications for embedded devices. After investigation we are seeing a big vendor in automation industry already testing this approach. This approach will enable device manifacturer creating new use cases for their device on the market (like plug and play gateways for machines or building automation)

Containerized application provide several intrinsic benefits to the application architecture (security, reliability, ecc..)

It will enable to position Qt even more into the "Edge devices" target focus, and not only as defacto standard for UI. Qt will become the framework that will enable developers creating containerized applications faster. Code once, deploy everywhere even on containers.

It will help us gaining new market share also into the non UI market, and saving market shares from potential external competitors (like Microsoft already provide containerized approach).

Product description

Qt Container will not be a product per se, but an image, providing embedded toolchains and Qt modules, which help Container developers to build images for selected targets. It should be GPL and Commercial, but of course dependencies will need to be considered.

Basic requirements

Qt Container definition. Qt Container allows easy installation and development environment to build and create container images for embedded devices.
Container, supporting building container applications for embedded targets.
- Container image, containing an embedded toolchain
- Build tool (make, CMake) changes to launch build container apps with the toolchain container
- The toolchain could be created/downloaded using B2Qt/Yocto
- The image itself could be downloadable from some repo.
Solution for graphics rendering
- One container image rendering on the screen
- Several images sharing the screen using some window manager. One big customer prefer using other window compositor but Wayland
User guidelines / documentation
- How to create containerized applications using Qt?
- How to optimise application container memory footprint?

Nice to have features

Qt Creator support
- In the Kit selection, there should be at least an indicator that the build will be a container build
- Functionality to edit the configuration file (e.g. Docker file)
- Project run settings or similar to define container deployment