[dot] Trolltech Released Qt 4.0

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1119953618/

From: binner <>
Dept: let's-do-the-Qt4-dance
Date: Tuesday 28/Jun/2005, @05:13

Trolltech Released Qt 4.0
=========================

   Trolltech [http://www.trolltech.com/] has released Qt 4.0
[http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/announcements/00000209.html] both
under commercial and GPL licenses
[http://www.trolltech.com/products/licensing.html] for X11, Mac OS X and
MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is
available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a
song and a music video [http://www.trolltech.com/video/qt4dance.html].
Read the Qt 4 Overview
[http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/qt4info.html] and the online Qt
Reference Documentation [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/] for more
information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com
[ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/] or from one of its mirrors
[http://www.trolltech.com/download/opensource.html]. Work on KDE 4 has
already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run
with Qt 4.

     Unlike previous Qt releases, Qt 4 is a collection of smaller
libraries which also allowed the restructuring of commercial offers
[http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/pricing.html] into Qt Console for
non-GUI development, Qt Desktop Light replacing the Professional and Qt
Desktop comparable to Enterprise editions.
 [http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/editions.html]
     There are five new technologies that are new within Qt 4:
 [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-intro.html]
    * Tulip [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-tulip.html], a new set of
      template container classes.
    * Interview [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-interview.html], a
      model/view architecture for item views.
    * Arthur [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-arthur.html], the Qt 4
      painting framework.
    * Scribe [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-scribe.html], the Unicode
      text renderer with a public API for performing low-level text
      layout.
    * Mainwindow [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-mainwindow.html], a
      modern action-based mainwindow, toolbar, menu, and docking
      architecture.

     In addition, the following modules have been significantly improved
since Qt 3:

    * A fully cross-platform accessibility
      [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-accessibility.html] module, with
      support for the emerging SP-API Unix standard in addition to
      Microsoft and Mac Accessibility.
    * The SQL module [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-sql.html], which
      is now based on the Interview model/view framework.
    * The network module
      [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-network.html], with better
      support for UDP and synchronous sockets.
    * The style API [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-styles.html],
      which is now decoupled from the widgets, meaning that you can draw
      any user interface element on any device (widget, pixmap, etc.).
    * Enhanced thread support
      [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-threads.html], with signal-slot
      connections across threads and per-thread event loops.

     The Qt Designer [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt4-designer.html]
user interface design tool has been rewritten as a collection of
interchangeable components. It now features support for MDI and SDI
modes and supports custom widgets. The project editor and the code
editor have been dropped.

     Qt 3 based applications have to be ported to be able to run with Qt
4. A porting guide [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/porting4.html], a
porting tool [http://doc.trolltech.com/4.0/qt3to4.html] as well as a
Qt3Support library for obsolete classes are provided. Trolltech aims to
maintain the Qt3Support Library for the lifetime of the Qt 4 series, and
will also support the Qt 3 series for a minimum of two years beyond the
release of Qt 4.

     Some known issues
[http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/known-issues.html] are listed
which are expected to be fixed in upcoming maintenance releases of Qt
4.0. Qt 4.1 will features certain advanced Qt 3 features rewritten for
Qt 4 which are now only available in the Qt 3 support library (eg. Qt 3
canvas, Qt 3 syntax highlighter). It is planned be released late in
2005.