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:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is everyone heading to this "everything is a web app" model?
Qt isn't going for web apps. It's going for Qt Declarative / Qt Quick. Just write some GUI apps with classic Qt and with Qt Quick, then you'll quickly realize how much more powerful it is to write GUIs declaratively instead of imperatively.
Re:If they plan on going mobile then i'm afraid (Score:4, Interesting)
GObject introspection tool seems to be a recent thing -- that's what I glean from what passes for their documentation. Never mind that the tool itself is not documented within GObject documentation, so don't blame someone who refers to official documentation (not the live crapfest) for not finding it. Various anti-Qt-fanbois have been whining for the longest time about the fact that Qt uses an extra tool (like if that was hard, gimme a break). It was GTK's supposed win factor that you could do everything manually; of course if you feel so inclined you can code up QObject metadata by hand too, what moc does isn't magic.
Suddenly --- boom, GTK has not one but two brand-new tools that generate C code: the introspection compiler, akin to moc, and Vala, a whole new language. I'd hardly call the GObject introspection project innovative in any way, I mean come on, moc has been with us for 15 years or so. Yes, they finally realized that not everyone is a masochist even if they write in C, so good for them, but IMHO it's a bit too little, too late. Oh, and good luck finding it if you don't know it's already there.
As a professional developer, I would not really bother even looking at their stuff, the documentation is so bad. From my viewpoint, the fact that the Gnome project is cut up into so many libraries doesn't help at all, nor does it instill any confidence. The individual libraries are all a crapshoot from integration viewpoint: some use GObject, some don't, the API conventions differ, it seems like a loosely bound mess. When you work with a monolithic framework like Qt, at least you can count on some measure of self-consistency.