Slashdot Mirror
Qt 5.5 Released
New submitter mx+b writes: The latest version of Qt, the cross platform GUI toolkit and development platform, is out for all major platforms. Highlights include better 3D, multimedia, and web support, as well as better support for the latest OS X and Windows releases (including Windows 10) and more Linux distributions.
Using web technologies to embed rich content into your application is not unheard of. The Steam client comes to mind as an obvious example: most of their UI lives in a webkit container. We do it at the company I work for, because it allows us to release new client and server versions separately. (We have a good reason to do that, not going into details.)
The alternative is either to launch an external browser and display your application's content there, which is cumbersome and then you end up having to test your application with all the browsers in the world to make sure it's compatible. Yet another alternative is to use a non-webbased rich content widget; in this case you are likely to end up with something inferior AND with a smaller pool of experienced developers to hire from.
QT is modular. This allows them to add features (you call it bloat, but I don't think it means what you think it means), and then it is up to application developers to pick and choose the modules that they want or need.
The demand for more features is omnipresent, and software developers can either choose to fulfil them one way or another, or lose their market share to someone else who does.
QT is a huge stinking pile of bloatware. I eschew it.
You are right, QuickTime is bloatware. However, Qt is well written and you are given the option to build only what you need and which libraries it should use. The render engine is exceptionally flexible too, allowing it to leverage many different methods of rendering. Don't have X? no problem, add a runtime argument (-platform linuxfb) and your qt program will display using the linux framebuffer. Qt also builds for desktops (e.g. Linux, Windows) and embedded systems (e.g. Android, iOS) and is easy to cross-compile for your device of choice.
if you think GTK+ is slimmer, guess again and check your binaries.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
When I've read "web support" I though "Cool! I will finally get good support to run QT apps on a standard browser".
actually, you can do that
But alas, it just means running a Chromium engine embedded in a QT app.
no, it uses WebKit while Chromium uses Blink, a fork of WebKit.
Who wants to run web sites in an app nowadays instead of opening them directly in a browser?
well... if you wrote a web browser in qt you would. what about an RSS feed reader? it has it's uses but it's true it shouldn't be abused.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Qt is not just a GUI toolkit. Doxygen has been using it for years. I do high performance computing and copy-on-write data structures (as Scott Myer suggest a decade ago in "More Effective C++") means I don't have to worry about functions returning references to a std::vector because QVector's copy constructor is O(1) as Scott Myers recommended a decade ago. I have a sane cross-platform cross-DB SQL interface. My strings are Unicode (and copy-on-write).
Qt allows you to write high performance code but in a style closer to Perl (especially with 11. "Auto" is "my") while enabling a coder to use high performance C code without needing to write fancy interfaces and compile schemes Everything from threading (QtConcurrent is great!) to file access to JSON to regex to is well-documented and the compile errors are sane (see: boost) and the code is terse (also: boost).
If you're doing serious C++ development with a small team, Qt is the best way to get things done in my experience...and it's also trivial to make a GUI to represent a SQL query.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Java is excellent for client code, first of all we have Swing and if you like to use Groovy: Griffon, a GUI framework, and secondly you have JavaFX the new Java GUI Framework.
Against Java and for Qt only speak, what you don't want anyway: portability to mobile devices.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
no, it uses WebKit while Chromium uses Blink, a fork of WebKit.
No, the new web module for Qt called QtWebEngine is based on Chromium, and yes, it is pretty much running a Chromium webview inside your application. It is the cost of having to have a standard web engine that works on all platforms, after Apple became too difficult to work with after Google left.
You can use the GPL/LGPL versions of Qt. Those options work well for a wide range of users (incl. some that sell proprietary software based on Qt).
If you need to have a commercial license for your proprietary software and can't affort 4,2k per year and developer, then you got more important problems than whether or not to use Qt;-)