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The Qt 4 Resource Center

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the develop-all-over-the-place dept.

e8johan writes "The Qt 4 Resource Center features articles regarding the next generation of Qt. Being the basis for the next generation of KDE and being available under GPL for all major platforms Qt 4 will make it even easier to develop powerful cross-platform applications."

5 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Let the free market work. by CyricZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let the free market work its magic. If their prices are truly too high, then the demand for Qt will drop, and they will be forced to lower their prices. Since that is not happening, then there must be shops which can afford to pay their licencing fee. And considering that they're most likely financially stable, there must be enough people willing to pay at that price.

    Now, if YOU can't afford it, then try some of the other open source alternatives. There is always wxWindows, FOX, FLTK, GTK+, the multiple GTK+ C++ wrappers, and so on.

    --
    Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
    1. Re:Let the free market work. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      Most software companies don't want GPL code and the buy-in price is way higher than Windows or OS X.

      But you're not comparing like for like there.

      The buy-in price for Windows (presumably we're talking about a site license for Visual Studio Enterprise here) may well be cheaper than Qt. But it only gets you Windows development.

      The buy-in price for OS X (= the price of the Macs to do your development on, presumably, since XCode is free) may well be cheaper than Qt. But it only gets you OS X development.

      Qt may be more expensive. But it gets your application onto all three platforms with no extra effort.

      Consider a hypothetical developer wanting to write a commercial application that runs in KDE. In this hypothetical future, Linux + KDE has taken off beyond our belief and now commands a 25% marketshare; Apple have trebled theirs, too, and now have 15% of the market; and Windows controls the remaining 58% of the market (apart from the 2% "other" that the Gnome fans will insist I put in here).

      Your hypothetical developer has three choices:
      1. Use a free toolkit on Linux. Let's say they choose GTK+ - that makes them a second-class citizen immediately in KDE, a third-class citizen in Windows (seriously, GTK+ on Windows is a pig to use), and it rules them out of the Mac market altogether because there is no up-to-date GTK+ for OS X.
      2. Go the platform-specific route. They get to pay once for Windows tools, once for Mac tools, and presumably use something free on Linux. They now have to write their user interface three times. That takes time, and time is money.
      3. License Qt. One single payment, one single codebase, and immediately they can deploy their application as a first-class citizen for 98% of the potential market, at no further cost whatsoever.
      Too expensive? Methinks Trolltech could charge twice as much and it would still be a bargain.
  2. Re:Price by spencerogden · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Ingnoring the fact that MSDN (meaning .NET and MFC I guess) and Apple (meaning Cocoa and Carbon) are not cross platform, you forget that they are distributed by companies that are using them to sell their primary products. Of course they want to make it easy for developers to make applications for their platforms, that's what sells OS's/Computer's.

    As someone else mentioned, your only other real choice for non-opensource cross-platform developement is Java and wxWindows.

    Time will tell if the price is too high, but most developers who have used QT will tell you that its pretty head and shoulders above any other cross-platform library.

    --

    Spencer Ogden

  3. Re:Qt4 and extra compile phase? by Paradox · · Score: 2, Insightful
    moc is a preprocessor, no compiler.
    Source processing is part of the compiler run. Preprocessing a phase of compilation. Therefore, moc another compile phase. Do not confuse this with compile phase within the cc executable itself, that's something different and lower level.
    No, using macros and moc *is* the elegant way.
    No. I'm sorry, it is not. C++ is a powerful language, and while it may not be my favorite, I cannot deny that people have done amazing things with it. Check out some of the more intense Boost libraries for an example of what can be done without a preprocessor.

    While that approach may be a bit more complex for the library maintainers, it certainly would make life easier for the developers, at least in my opinion.

    --
    Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
  4. Re:Price by TampaDeveloper · · Score: 2, Insightful
    "The results of the 2005 Qt Customer Survey are in! 96% of Qt customers said that they would recommend Qt to others."

    Maybe its that expensive because its really that good!

    Anyhow, there are lots of low cost development tools for developing the standard internal corporate software. People that buy Qt are making commercial apps. If $3000 is going to break you, then perhaps you need to reconsider your business strategy.