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Qt 4 Beta 1 Available for Download

Posted by michael on from the cutie-for-download dept.

scc writes "Get it here. Trolltech's press release gives the details, including the projected release date: late first quarter 2005. Qt is the cross-platform GUI framework at the heart of KDE. At the same time, Trolltech released under the GPL Qtopia 2.1, an implementation of their GUI framework for Linux-based PDAs."

7 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. more info here by carnivore302 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The press release is a bit light on details of what to expect from this release. here is a link that describes some of the features of the final qt4 version.

    Qt designer and assistent apparently can be embedded into kdeveloper, visual studio etc.

    Other improvements include

    a new paint engine

    a new text rendering engine

    new containers (which are lighter than the STL ones)

    better support for multithreading

    a new docking architecture

    and last but not least better performance and smaller memory footprint.

    --
    Please login to access my lawn
    1. Re:more info here by twener · · Score: 3, Informative

      > Does the improvements to Qt include totally ignoring backwards compatability

      You can compile in compatibility mode, there is a porting tool in work, and there is also a Qt 3 compability lib for now obsolete classes.

      > I looking forward to KDE 4, when once again we all get to load yet another multi-megabyte Qt library

      Qt 4 is broken down into smaller libraries: libQtCore (1,1MB), libQtGUI (4,5MB), lib Qt Network (0.2 MB), lib QtOpenGL (0.15 MB), libQtSQL (0.2MB), libQtXML (0.3 MB) and optional libQt3Compat (3 MB)

  2. still more info here by Mitchell+Mebane · · Score: 4, Informative

    The article at KDE.news

    --

    The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
    --Aristotle
  3. Re:No Free Windows Version by furry_wookie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually there is a version of the GPL QT ported to Win32. In fact its been out for quite a while.

    The Windows version of the ultra excellent lyx editor used it for their windows port in fact. See: http://www.home.zonnet.nl/rareitsma/lyx/

    Here is the home for the Win32 port of the GPL QT:
    http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt3-win32/compil e-mingw.php

    Its part of the cygwin project, BUT they have instructions for doing a native compile with other native Windows compilers such as Borland, Microsoft C++ etc..

    --
    -- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
  4. Re:I don't intend to start a flame war! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Pulled this from the newsgroups...and it covers most diffenences between GTk and QT:::

    - Qt is C++ based but it uses C++ in its own way because of its cross-platform
    nature (through a special preprocessor)
    - GTK is C based but it uses its own "object oriented" approach.
    - Qt can rely on QtDesigner and KDevelop that, together, make up a real IDE
    (similar to Visual Studio)
    - GTK must rely on Glade only, that is a GUI builder equivalent to QtDesigner.
    There is nothing like KDevelop for GTK (AFAIK).
    - Qt runs (with recompilation) on Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows (all
    versions)
    - GTK runs on Linux. There is a porting of the old GTK1.2 for Windows. A
    Porting for Mac OS X is under development (AFAIK)
    - Qt has internal support for scripting (QAS)
    - Should you need to add scripting capabilities to a GTK application, you have
    to embed your own engine (Python, LUA...)
    - Qt has integrated data-aware widget for data-centric applications.
    - GTK has a separate project (gnome-db) for data-aware widgtes
    - Qt-based applications and the KDE desktop "talks" each other via DCOP
    - GTK applications and Gnome "talks" each other via CORBA
    - Qt has exhaustive bindings for Python and a few other language (maybe Perl
    and Scheme)
    - GTK has exhaustive bindings for C++ (GTKmm), Python (PyGTK) and Ruby. There
    are less complete bindings for Perl, Scheme, Lua and so on. Have a look at
    www.gtk.org for a complete listing of the available bindings and their
    development status.
    - Qt has exhaustive documentation and a lot of examples form Trolltech and the
    KDE team
    - GTK has exhaustive documentation and a lot of examples from GTK team
    - Qt is freeware on Linux only
    - GTK is always freeware (but it is not completely available on Windows and
    MacOS X)

    Should you need to develop x-platform applications, have a look at wxWindows
    (and wxPython) as well. The Linux implementation of wxWindows relies on GTK+
    but wxWindows can run on Windows (all versions) as well, thanks to MFC, and
    on MacOS (all versions), thanks to a specific GUI engine.

  5. Re:Qt beats Java/Swing hands down by m50d · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have tried both of those, but for ease of development I've found something which beats both is Qt/Python. Give it a try if you haven't - it's actually easier than Qt/C++ because you don't have to worry about moc and declaring slots.

    --
    I am trolling
  6. Re:Qt Windows, Speed by computerme · · Score: 3, Informative

    its supposed to be 20% faster overall. Ignore the trolls.