It’s easy to go cross-eyed when a press release is full of technical jargon and foreign concepts. But we took a look at Nokia’s recent developer announcement for Qt 4.5 – a framework for creating programs that run cross-platform – and found some things worth highlighting. Nokia may even be setting a new benchmark for its competitors with this release of Qt.
Before we get into the details, let’s examine the term cross-platform application framework. What does that really mean? It means that software developers can write an app that will run anywhere Qt (pronounced cute) is supported. In practice then, the app will run not only in Windows, but also Mac OS X (now with Cocoa support!), Linux, embedded systems, heck even Windows CE.
There are other frameworks out there. Java, Adobe’s Flex, the Linux Gnome framework, Dekoh, Curl, etc. And that’s not really even looking hard at embedded frameworks, where there are just as many. But even with all this competition, Qt has made a name for itself by working with a lot of popular technologies, such as WebKit, the browser engine that Safari and Chrome are built on.
Improvements
- New Software Development Kit (SDK): Qt now includes an SDK in the install. This provides the developer with a robust set of tools, code libraries, and documentation to get started quickly.
- Qt Creator Cross-Platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE): Think of this as a really, really developer-friendly text editor. You can call libraries, compile code, and run tests all from within the IDE.
- LGPL 2.1 Licensing: Offering the ability to write your code under Gnu’s Lesser General Public License goes a long way to making this framework the choice of open-source advocates and Linux developers everywhere.
- 64-bit Cocoa Support: While Mac users were able to use Qt applications on Mac OS X for a while now, this release has direct support for the Cocoa architecture and 64-bit address space.
- XSLT Support: This one is a bit esoteric, but it is becoming more and more necessary to translate XML into HTML or more readable text. For example, the way Safari shows an RSS Feed as a web page. Having XSLT support is a great bonus.
Summary
We think that Qt is setting a new benchmark for their competitors with this release. With their framework offering so much potential, you might soon see firmware updates to your Roku box supporting web browsing and Flash video, cell phones with browsers that have fast Javascript handling and the latest HTML specification support, increased Mac awareness to Qt, and already-great Qt apps being picked up on Windows and other operating systems.
