Wednesday, November 2, 2011

QT - An introduction

Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface (GUI) (in which cases Qt is classified as a widget toolkit), and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers. It is produced by Nokia.

Qt is most notably used in Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop Elements, OPIE, Skype, VLC media player, VirtualBox, and Mathematica, and by the European Space Agency, DreamWorks, Google, HP, KDE, Lucasfilm, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens, Volvo, and Walt Disney Animation Studios.





It is currently produced by Nokia's Qt Development Frameworks division, which came into being after Nokia's acquisition of the Norwegian company Trolltech, the original producer of Qt. Nokia announced that it is going to drop Symbian technologies and base their future smartphones on Microsoft platform instead in February 2011. One month later Nokia announced the sale of Qt's commercial licensing and professional services to Digia PLC, although Nokia will remain the main development force behind the framework. Qt5 is expected to release in early 2012.

Qt is officially pronounced as cute, but unofficially, and due to its shadowing by stronger market giants like microsoft, it is still pronounced as Q T.



Qt uses standard C++ but makes extensive use of a special code generator (called the Meta Object Compiler, or moc) together with several macros to enrich the language. Qt can also be used in several other programming languages via language bindings. It runs on the major desktop platforms and some of the mobile platforms. It has extensive internationalization support. Non-GUI features include SQL database access, XML parsing, thread management, network support, and a unified cross-platform API for file handling.

Distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (among others), Qt is free and open source software. All editions support a wide range of compilers, including the GCC C++ compiler and the Visual Studio suite.

Windows may not have Qt and may need to be downloaded from here. Most Linux distributions include Qt in their repositories, but they can also be downloaded by clicking here.

For more details on Qt, check out its wikipedia page.

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