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Qt 4 Beta 1 Available for Download
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."
I seriously doubt anyone released a commercial application based on the Windows Qt free edition, and how can you possibly know how many people used in in-house? And can Trolltech even restrict that? I think that argument is very much in question.
Let's face it trolltech loves to crow about being a free software company, supporters of free software, yet when it comes time to "put up or shut up" they whine and pout like britney spears...yet they happily use free software to further their cause and pay the people who wrote it NOTHING.
Youe post was mildly interesting, but ignores what I consider to be a decent reason for not releasing a free Qt/Win...Windows is not free.
My gut feeling is they should pull their Mac version and license it for less than the windows version.
And keep things free for the free O/S. This would be a more logical argument from my perspective.
Finally, I think Qt is doomed. Within a matter of a couple more years Eclipse and the SDL will be rock solid and native on a number of platforms...including Windows, Mac and Linux. So that will be the end of Qt and TrollTech. Truly free software, from people who do not whine and cry, will win the day.
- GTK has GTKMM, C++ bindings that follow STL conventions so will be more familiar to C++ developers.
- GTK while being C based has excellent C++ bindings.
- GTK can rely on glade/libglade / any editor of your choice, including KDevelop
- Anjuta is an excellent IDE, many GTK developers also make use of Eclipse.
- GTK runs (with recompilation) on Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows
- GTK 2.x works fine on windows, not sure on the MacOS X status, but people seem to run Gimp just fine.
- GTK has no internal support for scripting because it is a GUI toolkit, no added bloat, you want scripting? embed perl / python / language of your choice, which provides a scripting language that people know and use that have significantly more power than QTs
- gnome-db not being part of GTK is an advantage, if you don't need it, you don't have the bloat.
- GTK based applications can talk to each other via the freedesktop.org DBUS protocol, which KDE will be migrating to as well. DBUS bindings exist for glib, python, c# so you can talk to other non GTK applications as well, not just limited to QT apps like DCOP.
- even talking via CORBA gives you more options than DCOP, you aren't limited to QT apps, which are the only ones that have a DCOP implementation
- QT is not freeware, it is GPL big difference
- GTK is not freeware, it is LGPL big difference + it is LGPL on all platforms.
- GTK is completly available on Windows, even following the WinXP theme.
Should you need to develop x-platform applications do no look at wxWindows or similar things, you end up with an app that looks bad in all environments as you are limited to the subset of features that each toolkit wxwindows utilizes supports.
The Qt framework definitely proves that C++ is head and shoulders above Java. All that C++ needs now is garbage collection, and we can forget about Java!
I suggest Qt to be names the official standard C++ library, and the governments around the world to pay Trolltech with a large annual amount of money so as that Trolltech can work for the next version. It's a pity that such good software is not the C++ standard!