Trolltech Releases First Qt 4 Technology Preview

An anonymous reader writes "Trolltech has announced the availability of the first Qt 4 Technical Preview. Qt 4, the next major release of the popular cross-platform C++ application framework which KDE is based on, is scheduled for final release in late Q1, 2005. Download mirrors here, here and here."

Comments

I love Qt!

[Per Wigren]

I just wish I could use it when developing cross-platform GPL-programs. :(

Re:I love Qt!

[arkanes]

Check out wxWidgets (formerly known as wxWindows) for an alternative. No, the support isn't as good as Qt, even if you pay. On the other hand, unlike GTK, your app won't look and run like ass on windows. And the community support via IRC and mailing list is excellent. wxWidgets is, in fact, the only toolkit I know of that is mature, cross-platform, and free. (I don't consider GTK to be mature in the cross-platform category)
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New and Improved

[UPi]

Qt has always been techically superior and rather geek-friendly. Looks like in the new release they have found PHB-friendly names for their existing components. For example, they call the QTL (Qt Template Library - their replacement for STL) "Tulip".

Seems like they have changed more classes than they usually do, and have moved a whole set of "obsolete" classes into a separate compatibility library to help the transition from Qt3 to Qt4. This probably means that developers have a few years to remove these classes from their codebase before they go from "deprecated" to "completely removed".

The press release seems to be quiet about their previous challenge to Java (they have claimed a few months ago to produce a Qt4 that will be in "direct competition" to Sun's offerings). I'm kind of happy about this.

SVG render ?

[johnjones]

so...

this would be a great thing to have and cross platform would be a killer feature
IMHO

regards

John Jones

Re:C++

[alex_tibbles]

Depends how long term you plan. There are benefits as well as problem associated with using C++, you know(!). My concern would be that now that there are decent C++ implementations (G++ 3.3 is pretty adequate, 3.4 will be good when fully stable, GNU libstdc++ is fine too, then there is stlport....) that they junk the non-standard re-implementations (slowly) and migrate to using standard code (reducing bloat).

major clarification

[Ender Ryan]

# Secondly, under the GPL for non-commercial usage only

I'm not a QT "fanboy," but I have to point out that GPL != non-commercial.

With the GPLed version, you can do whatever you want, but if you distribute your program, it must also be licensed under the GPL.

Re:C++

[OmniVector]

it's not so much performance/bloat that many of us are concerned with, but the language used. Not only does Qt require a hack language on top of C, but it requires moc, a hack on top of a hack language.

by hack i more or less mean a poorly designed language. of course gcc's implementation is good, but that has little to do with the design of c++. C has many advantages over c++ including but not limited to the fact that: you can write c++ in c (or at least do OOP in C to the similar functionaly of c++) and you can bind with just about every other language with minimal effort.

Re:The nail in the coffin release

[be-fan]

Qt doesn't use "non-standard" C++. You can write Qt code in regular C++ code --- moc simply writes a lot of boiler-plate for you. What you're complaining about is not that Qt uses non-standard C++ (since it doesn't), but that it doesn't use the STL style of programming. However, given that C++ is a multiparadigm language, that's perfectly valid.

GUIs are inherently object-oriented and amenable to dynamic programming techniques. That's why people like Objective-C (Cocoa), and Smalltalk so much for GUI programming. The STL style of C++ is very anti OOP and anti dynamic programming. Indeed, the creator of the STL, Alexander Stepanov, has said OOP is a hoax. While Stepanov is entitled to his opinion, and the STL is certainly useful for a wide range of tasks, it's silly to try to shoe-horn Qt into a programming style that doesn't fit it's problem domain.