Qt Jambi, Trolltech releases Qt for Java

Hardingfela writes "Trolltech has released a preview of its long awaited Java bindings for Qt 4. "Qt Jambi technology integrates Qt with the Java programming language, providing new possibilities for both Java and C++ programmers. This technology enables Java developers to take advantage of the powerful features of Qt from within Java Standard Edition 5.0 and Java Enterprise Edition 5.0" More information on the Jambi press release and tech details in the Jambi whitepaper. To get your copy sign up to the preview license (final release will be also available under an open source license) and download."

Comments

Please Wait... Okay? (Y/N)

[Doomedsnowball]

From the white paper:

The Qt Jambi Generator is a command-line tool that reads class definitions written in C++ and generates code that maps a C++ library onto an equivalent Java API. The generated code ensures that method calls made in Java are redirected to the corresponding method in the C++ library. The generator supports a selected subset of C++, covering the most common constructs such as multiple inheritance and operator overloading.

Well, I for one welcome our new void setText(String overlords);

Mekka Lekka Hi...

[Reverend528]

Mekka Hiney Ho.

Re:Mekka Lekka Hi...

[glarvat]

Me without my mod points... I actually found this quite funny rather than offtopic. I guess the moderators never watched Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

Re:Mekka Lekka Hi...

[BenjiTheGreat98]

The only reason I even opened this story was to see if anybody would make a PeeWee joke.

Finally

[oever]

The combination of fast, good looking Qt widgets, the clean way of writing applications with Qt and the ease of coding that java and Eclipse offer make for a very attractive platform for clean and fast development of graphical applications and great alternative to pure java or mono applications. As long as the Qt library can be easily distributed with the applications that use it, the fact that you're more than one framework should not be a problem.

If version 6 of java will not bring the improvements to the GUI that are promised, Qt + Java is a very attractive alternative for crossplatform development.

Personally, I like Qt's widgets a lot (even though version 4 has a few funny regressions) and the logic used for building the GUI is much nicer than what I know from Swing and AWT. I wish the trolls the best of luck and hope that KDE and free software in general may benefit from this development.

Re:C bindings?

[Anonymous Coward]

+3 Insightful? I'm guessing the ones who modded that aren't programmers.
  GUI programming in C is a *pain*, it's awful beyond words. I hate GUI programming, but python + qt (pyqt) actually works very well for that, Qt with C++ requires that awful moc, but at least it's survivable.
  If the parent knew anything about Qt and C, he wouldn't have suggested it at all.
  For the record, yes, I have done Qt programming with C++ and python, a lot of C coding (for about 10 years), so I'm familiar with all the different aspects in this, unlike, obviously, the parent.

Re:Never.

[Zephiris]

Now only if GTK+ decently supported Windows operating system versions, actually used native style/widgets, and weren't so mind-numbingly bad at performance. The native Java 6 Swing GUI stuff is actually faster than GTK+ now, despite still being in beta (try it yourselves and see!). "GTK+ enthusiasts" tend to be rabid about 'everyone should use this!', but it's overwhelmingly lackluster in performance and memory usage. People should make their own analysis and look into alternatives, not just take the GTK+ word for it. Qt is very well performing, very well behaving (it effectively wraps around native platform widget/engine stuff), and looks like a dream. GTK+ is (disclaimer: in my personal opinion) almost as bad as old X11 apps that just use ancient versions of Motif or Athena. GTK+ just doesn't blend in very well, and (again, opinion) leaves everything to be desired over more robust and compatible libraries.

Been Using This

[miyako]

I've been playing around with this for a few hours. Running some of their demos, things seem very snappy, and the applications look better than most Swing/AWT applications. I've always been fond of the way Qt works, and I think it will be nice to have the option of using it with Java.
Of course this is still a developer preview. After playing around with it for about 4 hours, I still can't get an application to launch, except for the demos that it ships with. This is probably due to my own ineptitude, but if I'm having trouble with it, I'm sure other developers will as well. I suspect that once there is an official release, things will be made easier (or the documentation will be made clearer) and there won't be so many problems.
PS: If anyone has played around with this and had success, maybe you can help me out. I created a project in eclipse, added the qtjambi.jar file into the classpath, set the PATH to qtjambi-linux-preview/bin and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to qtjabmi-linux-preview/lib, whenever I try to launch an application, I get
failed to load library: 'qtjambi'
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no qtjambi in java.library.path
...
Anyway, I think it will be really nice once I can figure out how to use it properly.

Re:C bindings?

[The Snowman]

GUI programming in C is a *pain*, it's awful beyond words.

Nah, it isn't all that bad. See, all you have to do is make a structure for your window. Then you set all the properties using preprocessor constants. Next you call some function and get a handle, which is like an object, but isn't. And, since it's a primitive, you can even use your window handle as a mouse handle, icon handle, etc. so it's really versatile! Also, creating a simple GUI in C is a short 50 lines of code, anyone can recite that from memory. Plus, you have the added advantage that C GUI code is tied to your architecture, so you can't port it from Win32 to X to MacOS without a lot of trouble. See? It isn't all that bad!

Re:C bindings?

[Bill Dog]

+5 Insightful? I agree that GUI programming in C is a pain (and I speak from past experience on this), but GGP was simply asking a question. How come just because you don't want to do GUI programming in C means that someone else shouldn't be allowed to?

Trolltech is obviously trying to branch out and expand the uses of their toolkit to other popular languages. Java is a no-brainer. I wouldn't be surprised if they targeted C# after that. And support for C, which is still very popular, seems like it could be added via the precompiler that's required for their C++ binding.