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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 think Qt is great, I use it for most of my projects, the only annoying thing is that the Windows version isn't free. There are free Linux and Mac versions released under the GPL, but no Windows version. \
The whole point of Qt is to make it easier to have software run on multiple OS's, but I can't test any of my stuff on Windows. Oh well, still kick ass software.
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
So basically your saying that they shouldn't be allowed to make money off Qt, but you should be allowed to make money off your software that uses it? Nice.
Qt has done more for C++ than any other single project. Kudos to the Trolls.
It costs a lot of money to develop commercial software with Qt (and by extension KDE) because they use the full GPL license (as opposed to something more reasonable like the LGPL) for the Qt library to extort money from developers. Trolltech effectively control any possible commercial software market for KDE (or anything that uses Qt).
So what if you have to buy a licence for commercial development? If you're out to make money on your software then you deserve to pay. Show me another cross-platform development suite as flexable and powerful as Qt that's free. Go on, I'll wait right here till you get back.
But naturally, Trolltech are benign lovable types, aren't they? Sure they are... except they are part-owned by SCO and Canopy -- the Linux IP grab and sue specialists. Avoid Qt. It's poisonous to free software.
If you're going to troll, at least take the time to write something with fewer holes in it. Trolltech is partially owned by Canopy but not SCO. Big deal. If you were to discover that the Unibomber owned 5% of Nabisco, would you really avoid eating thier crackers? Qt ( and Trolltech ) are great friends to FOSS.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
The article at KDE.news
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
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.
I hear QT is good stuff. This isn't a slam on QT in particular.
However, I'm still waiting for the day when mainstream GUI libraries catch up to where BeOS was ten years ago, and put drawing in a separate thread from everything else.
There is absolutely no reason why GUI applications need to become sluggish when they are doing something computationally intensive. There's no reason that an application should stop posting redraws every time it makes a blocking call (like, for example, doing file i/o).
My eyes were opened to this shortcoming of "modern" GUI libraries by an entry in Bram's diary a while ago.