What to Expect From Qt 4

An anonymous reader writes "A presentation given by Matthias Ettrich (director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of the KDE project), was given to the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. In this presentation, Matthias details what's going to be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next version of KDE after 3.2. Apparently, Qt 4.0 will not only include faster startup times and lighter memory usage, but will have sweeping architectural changes, including a splitting of Qt's GUI classes and non-GUI classes."

Comments

It Sounds Nice

[Jeagoss]

but, is it absolutely essential? In a time where code needs to remain compatible due to the large amount of projects that are depending on that code, huge architectual changes implemented in a large number at one time will just show that the project wont get used for quite a while. It will take time for developers to start supporting the new format, which will leave end users wanting.

Re:It Sounds Nice

[Overly Critical Guy]

Why are Linux users so afraid of change? It's the very reason we suffer through so much legacy compability to slow things down.

I welcome any sort of innovation. People will update their apps to meet any changes.

Re:This is what I really want from Trolltech.

[AugustMoon]

Big deal. There is no law against having your stock owned by questionable companies. Furthermore, no publicly traded company can really control who buys their shares. They are publicly traded, any one can buy or sell the ownership.

It doesn't automatically mean Trolltech inherits all the vices of every one who owns shares.

I would not be worried or even morally concerned until Trolltech's business decisions go south. Minor share holders don't dominate a company. Even 5.7% isn't a lot.

Re:This might mean something to me

[Bingo Foo]

Their licensing scheme doesn't "suck." It's just incompatible with your goals, i.e. a free toolkit which you can use to create salable apps. If you don't like it, you can:

1. Buy a Qt commercial developer license
2. Release your own apps as open source
3. Use a different toolkit

It sounds like you have chosen #3. I'm sure the people at Trolltech are able to sleep well regardless.

QT4

[SlayerDave]

I have recently spent a good deal of time programming with QT3. While QT is the best C++ GUI library and application framework, I think it needs some improvement. Here are my gripes, in no particular order.

First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code. While not strictly illegal, the use of the SIGNAL and SLOT macros, along with the Q_OBJECT macro, are not very good techniques. Specifically the reliance on macros to achieve basic GUI functionality violates a key principle in Meyers' "Effective C++", namely avoiding reliance on the preprocessor.

Second, several GUI widgets do not have a proper separation of data from view. I am thinking specifically of QTable and QListView. A better approach, from an OO design perspective, is the one taken in Java Swing. The JTable and JTree provide a nice mechanism for separating the data model from the GUI display. I find it obnoxious to have to subclass QTable and build-in data model methods to achieve results that would be cleaner under a Model-View design paradigm.

The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate. They should take a lesson from the Java API docs and reorganize the QT docs along those lines.

Why turn KDE into Gnome?

[HanzoSan]

This is the exact problem Gnome has. They keep messing around under the hood and nothing changes from the user point of view, development is moving at turtle pace because developers who want to write gnome apps cant figure out what to use because some new bonobo/mono type thing comes out every 6 months.

Developers need stability if they are going to work on big projects, we need at least a few years before a big re-write. I cant develop for Gnome because everytime I try to start they change something.