The Qt 4 Resource Center

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."

Comments

Price

[Cthefuture]

OK Trolltech, how about lowering your prices instead of increasing them every few months?!

Most shops and individuals can't afford that stuff for commercial development. Every other development platform is hella cheaper than Qt (MSDN, Apple, etc.).

Trolltech needs to take a clue from some failed projects that made it too hard for the system to be adopted by the masses because they were listening to the marketing department.

Re:Price

[spencerogden]

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.

Re:Price

[TampaDeveloper]

"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.

Let the free market work.

[CyricZ]

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.

Re:Let the free market work.

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I tried wxWidgets (formerly wxWindows) and found that while it did work for some things, there are some very serious bugs. For example, make a tree widget with too many items and it starts displaying improperly. By that I mean connecting lines drawn randomly all over the widget.

I know about fixing the code since it's free, but frankly, the code is a mess.

Qt's prices aren't too high at all, so I think we're seeing the free market magic that you're referring to. The price is going up, because Qt is actually a well-written, well-debugged, powerful, and well-organized toolkit.

free for open source

[acomj]

They seem to think that they're being fair..
http://www.trolltech.com/company/model.html

With the exception of java most libraries don't seem to be as complete a cross platform solution. There are other solutions, they're just trying to make a quality cross platform solution, there are alternatives, but you have to collect the parts and put them together yourself, and test etc...

There is GTK which is cross platform for windowing and widgets. (GNOME is built on this)

If you don't like it don't buy it, but I love the irony of software developers whinning about software prices (or pirating for that matter).

Qt4 and extra compile phase?

[Paradox]

Despite being a Qt3.3 developer, I've had almost no chance to check out any of the buzz on Qt4. What I want to know is, are they going to find a more elegant and in-language way to handle signals and slots, preferably one that does not require the use of an extra compile phase?

I'm all for meta-language programming. I love it. But not at the expense of an extra compile phase which complicates my makefiles and can introduce errors that were introduced when the generated code was inserted. I'm happy that Qt4 will finish opening up as a GPL'd library (that removes one of my biggest complaints about Qt), but are my technical concerns also going to be invalidated?

To me, this extra phase and the awkwardness of signals and slots syntax is a real weakness when compared to frameworks like Cocoa that don't need to resort to it. Now, I understand dynamic dispatch is hard in C++, but if the Boost people can get HOF-aware template-based lambdas, I'm certain that TrollTech could do better.

Re:Qt4 and extra compile phase?

[Paradox]

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.