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Qt Opens Source Code Repositories
sobral writes "Following the announcement of the LGPL license model, since yesterday the Qt source code repositories are open to the public together with their roadmap. The contribution model is online and will enable developers from the community to submit patches through a single click process, avoiding the previous hassle of sending in signed paperwork. The code is hosted at qt.gitorious.org and an instant benefit of this launch is that Qt Software has been working together with Gitorious maintainers for the last four months to improve Gitorious and all these new features are already submitted upstream."
You must be a bit behind the times as Qt no longer emulates a native look-and-feel but uses the native widgets of the platform.
Symbian is dead? Having 47% of smartphone sales worldwide in Q4 2008 means you're dead? Really?
Qt was open source long before Nokia bought Trolltech. The issue was that the original license they used didn't allow you to redistribute modifications and then the subsequent Q Public license, which was a free software license, wasn't compatible with the GPL. Then in 2000 Trolltech released it under the GPL. So I'm not sure where you got that Nokia open sourced Qt, since it had been open source for close to a decade before Nokia came along.
Yeah sure...
>> Sales of Linux netbooks collapsed.
Proof? Sure lots of netbooks are Windows, but that doesn't mean sales of Linux models aren't increasing with the market segment.
>> Google is providing a standardized UI on top of Linux.
Incredibly immature project, and isn't even close to a competitor to Qt on anything but embedded.
>> Symbian is dead.
Well, there are millions of devices out there still with Symbian, but I agree it probably has little future.
>> Basically, there is very little need for a specialized UI toolkit like Qt
Qt is not a specialized UI toolkit. It is a general class library for C++ that happens to include UI classes.
>> now that there are both fewer platforms for it to run
Qt runs on more platforms now than ever before. I don't know what you're talking about. Symbian, WinCE, Windows 98 to 7, Linux (normal and embedded), and Mac (with Cocoa even). Name another platform that can do that.
>> and more mature competitors on the remaining platforms.
Like what? Each platform has their own thing, but unless you feel like implementing your interface 5 times, that's not really an option.
You should tell my customers that. I've never received a single complaint about look&feel on my Qt4 software in 4 years.
Nokia relicensed Qt as LGPL which makes it usable by non-GPL programs.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Qt offers quite a bit more than just an abstracted UI model. Being able to have a totally common codebase across a number of platforms for a given application (including lower-level network code, threading, non-UI graphics manipulation, file I/O, printing, etc.) is a great help.
The only thing holding me back from totally adopting Qt was the outrageous licensing cost, not anything lacking in the toolkit itself. With it having gone to LGPL now, that is no longer an issue.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
My company develops cross-platform applications for Windows, MAC and LInux in C++. Qt is one hell of a cross-platform UI toolkit.
Since when was GTK+ a native graphics api? Oh wait, it's not. Qt uses Xlib on an X Windows System which is the native graphics API.
Qt offers quite a bit more than just an abstracted UI model. Being able to have a totally common codebase across a number of platforms for a given application (including lower-level network code, threading, non-UI graphics manipulation, file I/O, printing, etc.) is a great help.
Not to mention an XML parser, localisation and Unicode support by default, a great scripting engine, MD5 and SHA1, and awesome documentation, while the whole API is built to encourage best practices.
About the only thing I'm missing is archive handling with QDir. Including bzip for a fully functional NMDC client is so last year :)
qt 4.5 does have a gtk theme that uses gtk to draw the widgets. It allows me to continue using qt applications and have them match my desktop now that i no longer find kde usable as a desktop. The applications are still 1st rate.
QT emulates the platform widgets, but uses the platform API (if it exists) to draw them, all event processing and widget behavior is done by QT, much like Java Swing do. previous QT version emulated the widget look too, but that was before even Windows APIs provided themes APIs (Windows XP)
Qt 4.5 has an excellent GTK style that makes Qt and KDE applications look just like GTK/GNOME applications, down to button ordering.
Also, Qt Creator, their new C++ IDE, is a good illustration of what a Qt application can look like. Delicious.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
the shared_ptr equivalent in Qt is QSharedPointer (surprise!) not QPointer which is something quite different. I do suggest not using shared_ptr as the Qt version has better cross-platform support and is easier to use and like most Qt things has better readability.
Actually Qt was relicensed into GPL because of KDE, not because of Gnome. KDE used Qt and came under heavy fire due to using Qt, TrollTech relicensed then Qt due to this criticis, and later on hired some of the KDE developers!
The relicensing to LGPL now happened after the Nokia buyout, and was also preplanned because Trolltech always said, if it was bought or went bankrupt it would relicense it into LGPL!
And KDE isn't exactly the only software project relying on Qt. Here is a semi-official list of software projects using Qt. I do believe that software projects like Mathematica is a nice example of how widespread Qt is and how seriously it is being used.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
To be fair QSharedPointer showed-up in 4.5, hence the reason I had never heard of it until now. OPointer was forced upon me due to everything being a QObject, but then there was the other non-Qt half of the code that used boost, it was not pretty.
Is there any kind of Mercurial hosting for open source projects you can recommend?
http://bitbucket.org/
And soon, google code
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I've never used QtUiTools and I use Designer all the time.
I don't see any reason to create the UI at runtime. I just do the single inheritance model and everything gets converted to C++ at compile time.
Where does Hg succeed over Git? My understanding is that a lot of people really don't like the way git merges..
- It gets by with far smaller amount of commands, that are generally understandable and do "what you would expect" (whereas with git, to get "what you would expect" you need to do some serious study).
- It reports failures in a terminology that a normal person can be expected to understand.
- It's implemented in Python and little C for speed, not a hodgepodge of every language known to man.
- Probably deriving from previous point, it has a first-class windows implementation
- It gives revisions in local repo a running index number. It's transient, but often handier than using hashes all the time.
That being said, ease is the single most important benefit. This is important if the repo is being used by people from different backgrounds. Weigh the amount of hand holding you'll need to do for people new to the tool, and it becomes surprisingly important.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
You can compile the free version of Qt with Visual Studio (express or standard) without any problems. I do it regularly. You might be thinking of the IDE integration, which is a problem, but one for which Microsoft, not Nokia, is responsible.