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.'"

I stopped caring about Qt

[QuantumG]

Great as it is, I can't use it.

On Linux the libraries are now so damn big that non-KDE users wont install them.

On Windows the best development tools are moving away from C++.

On Mac it's just plain ugly.

I'm sure the embedded developers are loving it though.

Excellent

[Kjella]

I really look forward to the Phonon functionality. You can now finally write cross-platform players, capturers, encoders, indexers, mixers, filters and whatnot that'll work across all backends, as Qt is writing the backends for Windows (DirectShow) and OS X (Quicktime) as well. Note: I know not all of these features aren't in 4.4 some are pushed back to 4.5. I really hope this manages to unify the Linux multimedia experience. It's these kinds of deep changes I think are necessary for Linux to succeed in the long run, having to deal with xine/gstreamer/vlc/mplayer which all seem to work on different content but none on all is something the user shouldn't have to do. Having them all in one cross-backend API is a very big step forward.

What about Google Earth?

[IYagami]

Google Earth is based on QT and it's avalaible for Windows / MacOS X / Linux.

I think that google engineers have studied several tools for developing this program for multiple operating systems and decided that QT was the best toolkit

Re:I stopped caring about Qt

[larry bagina]

I installed Vidalia on my mac and didn't realize it was QT until I found the option to change the appearance.

Reinventing Wheels

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernel Developer: Here's a nice, easy to use sound backend. Enjoy.

Userspace Soundserver developer: Hey, since the Kernel guys can't provide autosense and switching and networked audio, let's abstract it.

Multimedia Framework developer: Hey, because one multimedia backend isn't enough, and isn't portable across OSes, let's abstract it and make it support many different sound servers.

Phonon developer: Hey, because one abstraction's not enough, let's abstract it again!

At this point, you have to wonder, what the hell is the point? You're reinventing the abstraction that everyone else abstracted away. You're adding latency for no reason. You're forcing people to use a toolkit written in a silly language, with the complexity of binding it to other languages being astronomical. What's the win? What are you gaining from this? The answer is simple: GStreamer was Not Invented Here.

Re:I stopped caring about Qt

[Verunks]

libqt-mt is probably qt3 not qt4, but anyway qt4 provides a lot of things and nowadays disk space is not a problem, try to mix together gtk+libxml+webkit/gecko+many more things and you'll probably use much more disk space than qt4 with different api and with all kind of cross platform issue I don't understand your problem with windows, but qt4 isn't just c++, there are many bindings for python, ruby and even c# on mac os x qt4 looks good to me, there is even an alpha version of qt4 that uses cocoa instead of carbon

ActiveX WebKit

[Xaroth]

This is only tangentially related to the Qt 4.4 release, but it seems to me that, when combined with ActiveQT, this theoretically provides the first ActiveX wrapper around WebKit. This sort of thing would enable hobbyist C# or VB users to quickly get web-driven applications up and running.

As I understand it, at current ActiveQT is only available under the paid licenses, which makes it difficult to create a F/OSS Windows application that uses such a control (which I happen to want to do).

Are there any ActiveX wrappers to WebKit out there (whether using Qt or not) that are suitable for use in F/OSS projects, or - failing that - any other drop-in ways to get a standards compliant browser pane up and running?

Re:I stopped caring about Qt

[Ant P.]

I'm not sure what a hardcore GTK purist is... is that someone who refuses to install Gnome because it requires about 50 different toolkits and frameworks? Someone who refuses to use Firefox because it uses XUL?

Honestly I used to run Gnome a long, long time ago, and avoided installing anything Qt-related because of how big it looked. Then I looked at the hundred or so separate libraries needed to run the bland windows 3.1 clone on my screen and I realised I had it completely backwards.

Re:What about Google Earth?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know (second hand info), Google Earth moved to QT for version 4, which was done after they were bought by Google. It was probably still *former* Keyhole engineers who made the decision, but they were Google engineers at the time.

Moderate library - poor company

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to program Qt. I thought it was great. I needed to do some commercial development so I bought a licence. After a while I found that the build system on Windows/Cygwin/Mingw was pretty comprehensibly broken. So I submitted a bug report, detailing what was wrong with a few suggestions on how to fix it.

I got a reply that can be paraphrased as "We can't be bothered".

So I patched the code and sent them the patches.

Reply: "We still can't be bothered". The next release *STILL* had the bug in it.

That's when I stopped using Qt.

Yes, it might be a nice library, but the weiners who write it are still in the OSS mind frame, they think its their toy and they don't have to listen to their customers.

When I've paid money for something, I expect a higher level of support than something I use for free. I don't expect to have to maintain my own fork of the source just to get the bloody thing to compile. This is something that they've failed to realise and why I now use Gtkmm, a library system that *is* truely cross platform.

On a separate point: Once I realised quite how good Gtkmm is I was flabbergasted at how hokey Qt actually is. In comparison with most of the (correct) design decisions made by Gtkmm, Qt is riddled with absolute howlers, e.g. type-unsafe meta compiled signals/slots, arbitrary memory strategy, woeful integration into the STL and a designer that makes me cry with frustration every single time I use it.

(Posting anonymously because bad mouthing companies who have dicked you over now seems to be illegal)

Re:I stopped caring about Qt

[GigaplexNZ]

You mean like how iTunes and Safari look completely at home on Windows? Apple fans have double standards; they expect uniformity on the Mac and allow Apple software to stick out like a sore thumb on Windows. If an OS X user rejects my applications because the toolkit only looks 95% at home compared to other applications, it is their loss, not mine.

Re:I stopped caring about Qt

[Weedlekin]

"Many Mac users, myself included, are very finicky about apps that do not look or feel like Mac apps."

While others are like me, and don't give two hoots if the app does something we want or need. I'm far more worried about the ability to paste information between apps, use of standard centralised resources such as the dictionary / thesaurus, support for drag-and-drop conventions, and Mac-style installation and removal mechanisms than whether it's a little ugly or uses a few non-standard keystrokes.

"Using an app that looks significantly out of place in an otherwise consistent UI is very annoying"

Unless of course it's from Apple, who, like MS, seem to be quite happy to break their own look-and-feel guidelines.

"I fully understand why some developers steer clear of Mac support for that very reason, but it is a reality, and it's not going away"

It will however become less significant as Apple's market share grows, because there are more and more new users who're running Windows apps on their Macs via dual-boot or virtualisation, and they're a lot less Mac-like than QT-based ports (even Java stuff is more Mac-like than software written specifically for Windows).

Re:Trolls are great :)

[Ed Avis]

Unfortunately a bolt-on Boehm garbage collector is not real GC. It has to guess what things are pointers and what aren't, so it can get confused by integers that happen to be a valid address. If you think that's unlikely to happen in practice, consider the scope for denial-of-service attacks by feeding in data designed to trick the GC. When dealing with security, theoretical possibilities become all too practical.

Real lambda functions (not Boost's weird simulation) will be cool.

Re:A note on signals and slots

[master_p]

Yeah, sorry, I meant the MOC.

I do not want to run the MOC myself, neither would I want to have to setup a build action for each file. I just want to press F5 and see my app compile. Anything else detracts from the development process.

I can't buy Qt4, my boss will not buy it.

I did signals/slots programmatically, and it's great. I studied the boilerplate code the MOC creates and simply copied it into templates. Now I don't have to use any special tools.

Another benefit from this is that I can use any function as a slot, even stand-alone functions themselves. I don't have to declare slots any more!!!

I understand that for Trolltech, the signals and slots mechanism is used as a kind of vendor lock in, but for me it's a nuisance, at best.

Re:Widgets in QGraphicsView look *really* promisin

[FunkyELF]

You can do similar things with Swing but with a LOT more work. Also you'll feel like you're working against the system the whole time you're programming it. I bought a book called "Filthy Rich Clients" after seeing some stuff at JavaOne last year. I got half way through it and realized everything was a hack.