Boost for KDE Developers

Speaker: Volker Krause

Boost (http://www.boost.org) is a very powerful, platform independent and widely used set of free software C++ libraries. Its features overlap partly with those of Qt, for example on file system and network I/O, still it provides a large set of unique features that are not available in Qt, starting from little utilities for generic programming and various mathematical functions up to frameworks for graph algorithms and template meta-programming as well as an entire parser generator. Boost is also used as a kind of staging ground for future C++ standard extensions and tends to stretch the C++ language to its limits, just looking at some of its more complex parts can therefore be quite educating.

For a long-term Qt user the Boost API might look a bit alien on first sight, maybe that's why there has been quite some reluctance to use Boost within KDE initially. This changed with KDE SC 4 and nowadays several modules use and depend on it, including Akonadi and KDE PIM.

This talk will not attempt to even remotely cover the entire Boost libraries. Instead it will present a handful of little tools for common problems that are easy to use and to integrate into Qt applications, all based on real-world use cases from the Akonadi and KDE PIM projects. One example for this is boost::bind, which make STL and Qt algorithms so much more useful.

The goal of this talk is to get you started with Boost and hopefully interested enough to explore its variou other features.

Volker Krause

Volker started contributing to KDE back in 2002 and quickly got stuck in the KDE PIM code. Having worked on KDE PIM for some time made him join the newly founded Akonadi project in 2006 where he maintains parts of the core components. Working as a Software Engineer at KDAB he is currently in the lucky position to spend most of his work time on contributing to Akonadi and KDE PIM.