Nokia Announces Qt 5 Plans

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Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 13, 2011 @12:43AM from the eggs-in-a-backup-basket dept.

aloniv writes "Since Nokia announced its switch to Windows Phone 7, people have been worried about the future of Qt. Well, it turns out Nokia is still going full steam ahead with Qt, having just announced their plans for Qt 5. Some major changes are afoot code- and functionality-wise, but the biggest change is that Qt 5 will be developed out in the open from day one (unlike Qt 4). There will be no distinction between a Nokia developer or third-party developer."

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Re:wtf by eplawless · 2011-05-13 00:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

At this point, Nokia is just tossing stuff out there as they think of it. "Oh man, we pissed off a massive chunk of our developer base. How do we make them less furious at us? ...besides scrapping the Windows Phone thing, I mean."
translation.... by metalmaster · 2011-05-13 00:50 · Score: 5, Insightful

"There will be no distinction between a Nokia developer or third-party developer." becomes "Develop it yourselves you lazy bastards, but dont forget to put our name on it too"
1. Re:translation.... by Anonymous Coward · 2011-05-13 00:54 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  "There will be no distinction between a Nokia developer or third-party developer."
  
  Which will be a disapointment for any Nokia developers hoping to get paid.
2. Re:translation.... by diegocg · 2011-05-13 02:04 · Score: 2
  
  Plans to make QT a real community project already existed before Stephen Elop was made CEO of Nokia. And I would be very happy to see 3rd parties developing big chunks of QT - that would mean it can survive without Nokia.
3. Re:translation.... by suy · 2011-05-13 02:27 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  "There will be no distinction between a Nokia developer or third-party developer." becomes "Develop it yourselves you lazy bastards, but dont forget to put our name on it too"
  Very wrong. Look at the list of maturity and status of Qt modules. Nokia still is ready to maintain a huge percentage of Qt. They simply deprecated stuff because they think that other alternatives are better (eg. ditch Phonon because there is QtMultimedia). The only piece that Nokia is not interested in maintaining and that the comunity is worried about, is QtSVG, because the alternative, the SVG support in Webkit, is considered too big/slow, or unsuitable for being LGPL only.
  This is Qt development frameworks (aka "old Trolltech") being honest in what they are interested about.
  Oh, and being even more open in how they develop (they already have public BTS and reports).
4. Re:translation.... by Kynde · 2011-05-13 02:42 · Score: 2
  
  Plans to make QT a real community project already existed before Stephen Elop was made CEO of Nokia. And I would be very happy to see 3rd parties developing big chunks of QT - that would mean it can survive without Nokia.
  QT would have no problems without Nokia. It's the "with" part that people are worried about. And never so much as now that there's another bigger "with" involved.
  
  --
  1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Re:This will kill KDE by karper · 2011-05-13 01:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's going to be a behind-the-scenes change and it's not as big a deal as the kde3kde4 change. Reference: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/05/relax.html
Is the lock in that strong? by NtwoO · 2011-05-13 01:18 · Score: 2

The deal between Microsoft an Nokia has been a big topic with many opinions. The opinion that Microsoft actually needed a strong hardware platform for their OS more than Nokia needed Win Mobile for their phones is a strong contender for me. Maybe having a say in keeping Qt open is a clear signal that this is also truly the case. It could very well be that Nokia was keen for the partnering but is not ready to sell their soul and cut off all options for the future. ~

--
! /* */
1. Re:Is the lock in that strong? by operator_error · 2011-05-13 02:23 · Score: 2
  
  The annual (linux) Meego conference is in a few days' time, in San Francisco. Google News (search) reveals that the Nokia N950, the successor to the N900 will be _probably_ be announced at this conference.
  Nokia has never backed-off its support for Meego. Well, okay they have hyped and now focused development resources towards their M$ partnership, but to the extent possible given their current business strategies, they still support their prior open-source OS strategy. In other words, they haven't really backed-away from Meego, while they will support WP7 going-forward. (But in lieu of the recent M$ partnership, they need to hype M$, especially following that particular announcement).
  http://sf2011.meego.com/
  Vote with your feet folks. Meego is still a very good mobile OS worth buying and developing for; especially if you are developing for your own purposes. Today's news reinforces this.
2. Re:Is the lock in that strong? by CRCulver · 2011-05-13 03:52 · Score: 2
  
  Elop has announced that Nokia is trying to hand Meego over to another company like LG and does not believe Meego has a place in its longterm strategy. Also, there's a big controversy that this new "N950" model will feature just Maemo with a few updates applied, and it does not meet the Meego standards. There's plenty of coverage of the controversy over at Maemo Weekly News.
Re:KDE5 by Randle_Revar · 2011-05-13 01:29 · Score: 3, Informative

KDE5 will not break the world like KDE4 did. Just as Qt5 will not break the world.
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/05/relax.html
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/05/qt5-kde5.html

--
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Re:Best GUI library for C++ by rwa2 · 2011-05-13 01:52 · Score: 2

Good call... so in other words, something use something like http://www.wxwidgets.org/ for cross-platform development while still hooking into native widgets?
Re:Ugh.... by Entrope · 2011-05-13 01:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

I came from a Gtk+ background, but am using Qt Quick (QML) in one project. The widget set as of Qt 4.7.2 is woefully anemic, but other than that, it seems like a general improvement over using C++ for the entire UI. At least 90% of user interfaces (averaged over the world's applications; there are a few very graphics-intense apps that bring down the average) do not need the marginal speed improvement you can get by using C++ instead of QML. Qt does a pretty decent job at making it easy to go between native C++ widgets and QML code, so C++ developers get to focus on the parts of the GUI that need performance.
What is in using QML for me? I get to offload most of the GUI development to a UX designer who is better at that sort of thing (and costs my employer less per hour of work). Then I get to focus on the novel and application-specific parts of the interface. I also get cleaner separation between those application-specific bits and the overall skin.
Re:QT5 should drop MOC and adhere to standards by DMiax · 2011-05-13 02:03 · Score: 2

Qt already adheres to standards. MOC is just a boilerplate generator and the actual code is compiled with any standards-compliant C++ implementation.
Re:This will kill KDE by DMiax · 2011-05-13 02:05 · Score: 2

Relax :) (blog post from one of the head developers of KDE)
Re:QT5 should drop MOC and adhere to standards by halfdan+the+black · 2011-05-13 02:10 · Score: 2

Don't think it really can drop MOC or something like as still be a viable UI library.

Dynamic dispatch is pretty fundamental in event driven UIs, and not sure if C++ can really provide such a concept. Thats why we need more dynamic languages like JScript/Python/Objective-C/C# for this type of programming.

I'm sure there are things C++ is good for, but its not something as dynamic as UIs.
Why is Nokia spending money doing this? by mr+crypto · 2011-05-13 02:14 · Score: 2

As much as I'd like to believe that it's because they are good people doing good things, why are they putting money into this, and how long can we expect them to keep doing so?
1. Re:Why is Nokia spending money doing this? by Locutus · 2011-05-13 05:46 · Score: 2
  
  well it's not a plan to fragment the Qt developers and projects and it's not so that if that were to happen yet another cross platform dev tool would benefit Microsoft and their plans for Windows Phone 7, 8, etc app development. No, it's not that. Look, over there! Ice cream!
  
  it does seem strange that Nokia sold the rights and licenses to collect revenue from customers yet retained control of the Qt development with little to no form of income from it. But then there's this poison pill they agreed to when purchasing Qt and the only company who would care a bit about Qt getting set free is Microsoft... well, it does make one wonder about all this. After all, a dead Qt is worth more to both Nokia and Microsoft than a lively and there's only one way to kill it and that's via starvation. How do you starve Qt out of existence? You can't do it directly or there would be an up roar and would possible even trigger Qt's freedom. Nope, you've got to starve it without anyone knowing that's what you plan on doing. Announcing big changes and new versions over a short period is a good start. Throw in some incompatibilities, reduce the platform support and you're on your way. So does Nokia have a good reason to be doing this and putting in the money? Are they putting in much money? Since they are run by a Microserf and sold their sole to Microsoft they no longer can be trusted at their word. IMO
  
  LoB
  
  --
  "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Re:Best GUI library for C++ by Timmmm · 2011-05-13 02:23 · Score: 2

I've used Qt on OSX. It works fine. And Qt looks native on all platforms so I have no idea what you're talking about...
Re:QT5 should drop MOC and adhere to standards by 21mhz · 2011-05-13 02:27 · Score: 2

We as in who? The "template metaprogramming" weenies who could not understand for a decade why C++ is a train wreck?
Don't bother; "we" the practical developers creating real-world maintainable software don't need you on our projects.

--
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Re:Ugh.... by DrXym · 2011-05-13 02:45 · Score: 2

I'd rather having nothing. I'm using Qt to write C++ code not to be a Javascript monkey. Looks like the Qt are trying to make themselves irrelevant with statements like:
Actually QML is there to try to make it easier to develop apps by allowing people to declaratively define their UI and use minimal inline or external language for the binding. It's a perfectly sound practice, variants of which one can be found in various other GUIs, both in thick clients and web development. e.g. Flex,. XUL, XAML, JavaFX etc. For starters it means doing away with a vast amount of boilerplate, faster application prototyping, faster development build cycles, greater portability, less bugs caused by programmer error which ultimately leads to faster time to market and a higher quality product.
I realise if you're too set in your ways to adapt that it might be easier to denigrate such efforts than appreciate their uses, but that's your problem not the platform's.
Re:Best GUI library for C++ by Timmmm · 2011-05-13 02:50 · Score: 3, Informative

> The only way to do it right is to use the native controls, which QT DOES NOT.
I think you have not used Qt for a long time...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(framework)#Use_of_native_UI-rendering_APIs
Re:QT5 should drop MOC and adhere to standards by tibit · 2011-05-13 04:12 · Score: 3, Informative

C++ simply does not provide the introspection needed for a major application development framework. If it did, you could drop MOC. The way it stands, moc basically generates introspection tables because the out-of-touch [expletive deleted] folks who design C++ couldn't be bothered. That's my take on it.
Every time you interface C++ code with any sort of an interpreted or JIT-ed language, you have to generate "bindings" using an external tool precisely because C++ lacks facilities for code to know about other code. Qt folks were nice enough to maintain such a tool themselves and to make it a core part of their process. I don't consider it a bad thing. QMetaObject system makes it fairly easy to expose QObjects to any other language that's either interpreted or JIT-ed.

--
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Re:QT5 should drop MOC and adhere to standards by tibit · 2011-05-13 04:16 · Score: 2

It's not even about template metaprogramming. Template metaprogramming simply does not provide several facilities that are make-or-break for language binding generation. C++ does not have built-in facilities needed by binding generators, this has nothing to do with Troltech/Nokia's developers "ineptness". Guess why swig still exists? Hint: because whoever designs C++ lives on a little cloud-9 where you don't interface with anybody who doesn't use C++. It's a basic deficiency of current C++ spec, and there's no way around it other than running a code generator external to the compiler.

--
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.