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In-Depth With Qt 4.4
QtPi writes "Trolltech has announced the availability of Qt 4.4, the cross-platform software development framework. Ars Technica has an in-depth look at the release, which include an integrated WebKit-based HTML rendering engine, the new Phonon multimedia framework, support for Windows CE, and significant improvements to the QGraphicsView system. 'Qt 4.4 brings a lot of rich new capabilities to the toolkit that are sure to please open source and commercial software developers. It sounds like Trolltech already has some nice plans for Qt 4.5, and we will hopefully get to hear more about the long-term roadmap after Nokia completes its acquisition.'"
Graphics View alone is an extremely powerful tool - now it seems to be able to do things no other toolkit comes even close to. I can't wait to use 4.4 in an application I'm developing right now (a game map editor), this feature will allow me to make some parts of the user interface a whole lot simpler and more intuitive, throwing away a bunch of docks and toolbars in favor of a more interactive workspace.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Vladimir just posted about working more on Qt for Firefox - http://blog.vlad1.com/2008/05/06/well-isnt-that-qt/ - the more devs that can help, the quicker this will happen.
The ZSNES developers for one prefer how Qt works and R. Belmont (of MAMEdev fame) also stated that the only reason he used GTK+ on the Linux port of Audio Overload was because various portions of the code weren't compatible with the GPL. If they had been, he'd have used Qt instead. I also prefer Qt, hence why I use KDE in preference to anything else and why I view the possibility of Mozilla using Qt with some excitement.
I'd go as far as to say that GTK+'s 'killer feature' these days is the licence. The fact that it uses the LGPL as opposed to the GPL and was open sourced well before Qt is why it's remained so popular. In most other respects, Qt is the better toolkit.
Huh? A Qt license is expensive, but once you have it you can create all the Qt apps you want. At least, that's what my Qt license says. I think you have been misinformed.
But, per application, recurring per year, its expensive
Again, there is no "per application" charge. The "per year" charge is if you want support -- if you don't want/need support, just buy the Qt license and don't renew it after a year. You'll still be able to use the version you bought indefinitely.
And should we port to Linux and Mac OS/X, our licensing fees for MSDN would be £453 (approx $1116) and our Qt fees would be $126,000).
Are you talking about porting a
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
A number of possible answers, with varying degrees of importance/truth depending on your opinions:
- Because QT is cross platform.
- Perhaps it saves enough development effort over the MS stuff that it is worth the cost.
- It has a GPL version on all the major desktop platforms, so fully OSS apps are possible
- Is compiled instead of interpreted
There are probably lots more differences between the platforms that I missed as well. Not all of them would favour QT. Depends what you're looking for I guess.
But it isn't surprising that QT is popular with much of the Slashdot crowd, since it is GPL and supports non-Windows platforms. So I'm not sure why one would even have to ask why people here prefer QT over MSDN and Visual Studio.
Actually, in Qt we have a mandate for backwards binary compatibility. Only if it's an absolute necessity is binary compatibility broken, and I honestly can't think of a single time in the 4.x stream of code that we have done that. So, your "framework hell" argument is moot. Only the latest version of Qt is "needed", and should support all applications compiled for previous revisions of Qt4.