Qt 5 Alpha Released 117
After nine
months of effort, Nokia's Qt Lab has announced the availability of
the alpha
release of Qt 5. Goals achieved for this release include a new platform
abstraction layer, a re-architected graphics stack, and the
inclusion of Qt Quick as a first-class citizen (hitting version 2.0, and using Google's V8 Javascript engine to boot). Quoting Lars Knoll:
"'Qt 5 should be the foundation for a new way of developing
applications. While offering all of the power of native Qt using C++,
the focus should shift to a model, where C++ is mainly used to
implement modular backend functionality for Qt Quick.' I can say that
we came a good way closer to this vision with Qt 5.0. The model is
working nicely on the embedded side of Qt where UIs are full
screen. On the desktop, we have laid most of the foundations required
for this model, but it’ll take us until 5.1 or 5.2 to really take this
into use."
Nokia has posted the the source and detailed release
notes on the Qt wiki.
Re:Nokia's fate? (Score:3, Informative)
In the event Qt Labs/Nokia don't maintain the Qt framework anymore the code gets passed over to the KDE developers. I believe the code would then be either under the BSD license of a dual BSD/GPL license. You can find the details here: http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
Re:Nokia's fate? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nokia's fate? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
QML2 is pretty cool. I had the same attitude to QML1, but QML2 is a pretty good language to program the GUI in, while doing still all the real work in C++. Essentially QML is to Qt Designer what LaTex is to Word.
Re:Nokia's fate? (Score:4, Informative)
Qt is open source. Nokia could make all future iterations closed source, and then open source version gets forked like OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
Re:Nokia's fate? (Score:5, Informative)
They've been moving resources around for a while now to ensure that QT isn't tied to Nokia's success.
Commercial support contracts have been sold to Digia. They've been the drivers behind several patch level releases already, including 4.8.1 a couple days ago.
The QT project has adopted an open governance model, with members outside of Nokia. They've moved their web presence off of Nokia's servers. They switched to LGPL licensing from QPL over a year ago.
If Nokia diverts resources progress may slow, but QT is not going anywhere. It will almost certainly outlast Nokia.
Re:Focus on Mobile development (Score:4, Informative)
My interpretation is that Qt Quick is not yet suitable for desktop use, while the 'old-style' C++ objects should remain as usable as they are now.
While I'd love to see how Quick could help with improving my workflow, since I only work on desktop interfaces I guess I'll have to wait.
Re:One or two Questions... (Score:4, Informative)
Question is "have they changed this?"
Whats the bug number where they were notified. Why did they refuse to fix it?
AutoIt:
AutoIt has been designed to work on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows Server 2008/2008 R2, Microsoft Windows 7.
So you are complaining about an open-source development toolkit that supports every major OS and several Mobile OSs against a Windows-Only, proprietary application. I really don't think you are going to find many sympathizers here.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
That's a perfectly valid question, and the answer is not obvious at first.
When you come from a programming background, you have a very powerful hammer, and everything ends up looking like a nail, including GUIs. The problem with this approach is that you can never have either a non-programmer or a GUI tool help design your user interface. For trivial applications this isn't a problem, but it quickly becomes limiting on larger projects.
Microsoft had an interesting hack to make GUI design work with imperative languages -- split class files. One file would contain only a strict subset of the imperative language that the GUI designer could handle, the other matching file would contain the real code. This solution was fragile and would often result in the designer failing to open. This was already half way there to a declerative domain specific language, because the subset of the imperative language that the designer coud parse forbade any control flow. I first had the "lightbulb" moment when I saw Microsoft's next-gen XAML designers, where they basically formalized the GUI language into an explicitly declerative document format with a strict grammar. It allowed more complex GUI designs with well defined parsers, object models, design-time appearance, etc... All the problems just vanished.
This is by no means a Microsoft invention, declerative visual languages have always been more successful, flexible, and interoperable. A case in point is HTML, which is a purely declerative language, which has lots of advantages that has contributed to its success. Try putting yourself into the shoes of a search engine developer and imagine if instead of declerative SGML-derived pages, you had index imperative PostScript? Not just any old automatically generated PostScript intended for printing, but developer authored PostScript with as much complexity as a typical JavaScript library! How would you go about writing a designer for a language like that? You'd start by restricting the problem to some strict subset...
Re:Nokia's fate? (Score:4, Informative)
Why not read the QT Promise?
QT is under a dual development and the source code is held in escrow by the FOSS foundation to be released under GPL should QT Labs go under.
Re:Nokia's fate? (Score:5, Informative)
Correct. I believe the QT foundation has a longstanding agreement in place to ensure that.