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Qt 5.6.0 released

blog.qt.io

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Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#11

Post by ThePhysicist »

Qt is easily the best cross-platform UI kit that I have used, especially in combination with Python, which turns it into THE rapid prototyping tool.

For my research I used PyQt/PySide to build lots of UI components for controlling my lab equipment, visualizing my data and running code in an interactive way. While doing this kind of thing using a native toolkit (MFC, GTK) would have been possible, it would probably have been much difficult and time-consuming.

For me, Qt is a great example of beautiful and very good software architecture: Creating a cross-platform UI kit that works on platforms as diverse as Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android and Symbian and integrates well with the peculiar set of features of each platform is a daunting task. Qt as a UI abstraction layer solves this really beautifully, and both the philosophy and the architecture of the code is very well thought through. And in the last five years the developers added many interesting ideas (QML, Javascript support) that compete with and sometimes go beyond what's available in many native toolkits. So if you like reading good code you should have a look at Qt.

Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#12

Post by shadeslayer »

shmerl wrote: post #8

I hope Debian unstable / testing now can move with updating KDE Plasma 5 to the latest version. Looks like they were stuck waiting for Qt update.

I'm actually running Debian testing with Plasma 5.4.3, and Plasma 5 has no hard build deps on Qt 5.6 yet. They also have 5.5.4 in experimental. So it's mostly that the Debian Qt/KDE team has a bit of a conservative approach to updating Plasma in unstable.

Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#13

Post by nly »

The high DPI changes sound very promising. I experimented with Qt on Android around 18 months ago and, at the time, had to do a bunch of JNI calls to get an accurate device dpi, and do hacky workarounds, like scaling in the QML, just to get things to look half right.

Qt 5.6 will be on my todo list for further experiments.

Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#14

Post by kenOfYugen »

I have never used Qt, and I feel like I have missed out. What concise sources would be recommended for someone with a Web development background, in order to start with Qt?

Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#16

Post by shmerl »

shadeslayer wrote: post #12
shmerl wrote: post #8

I hope Debian unstable / testing now can move with updating KDE Plasma 5 to the latest version. Looks like they were stuck waiting for Qt update.

I'm actually running Debian testing with Plasma 5.4.3, and Plasma 5 has no hard build deps on Qt 5.6 yet. They also have 5.5.4 in experimental. So it's mostly that the Debian Qt/KDE team has a bit of a conservative approach to updating Plasma in unstable.

I'm using Debian testing too, and noticed the delay. Before, KDE Plasma was moving quite in timely manner in Debian. By now released version is already 5.5 and 5.6 approaching, and Debian still is stuck on the older one. There were some serious Qt bugs[1] which were causing a lot of instability which were fixed in Qt 5.6 so I thought this delay was related.

[1]: like this one: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-42985

Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#17

Post by crudbug »

ronjouch wrote: post #10
crudbug wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the links. The QuickFlux is promising start for the Flux pattern in Qt. I was thinking more on the lines of React Native [1] like support in Qt. Essentially, having React render() function backed by Qt Quick Controls? [1] https://facebook.github.io/react-native/

> QuickFlux is promising start for the Flux pattern in Qt. I was thinking more on the lines of React Native [1] like support in Qt. I know :) , and I searched for that too when I joined a QML project after working on a React one. So far there's nothing like that, thus the "around" in my comment. Now, about why no one tried that yet, I'd propose that newcomers (including me) want it but don't know the platform well en…

I am on the same boat with you. C/Java/JavaScript background. I hope someone cracks this soon.

Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#18

Post by baldfat »

officialchicken wrote: post #15

Only one question: what changed in the License? Each version of Qt since 4.0 has been getting progressively away from open source.

I'm not sure what you are referring to? It has been LGPLv3 currently was LGPLv2.1 but v2.1 is not recommended anymore so they dropped it. "LGPLv2.1 is an older version and not recommended by the Free Software Foundation for new projects anymore."

It's dual licensed and it is rather prominent everywhere on their webpage that it is a dual licensed Open Sourced / Commercial project. I have found Qt to be very Open/Free friendly, unless you have other evidence to prove other wise?

If your referring to the commercial aspect I'm not sure since I only use the LGPL license.

Re: Qt 5.6.0 released

#19

Post by FigBug »

Cyph0n wrote: post #9
justsaysmthng wrote: post #5

I've used Qt many years ago (2007) and I liked the experience, but I had to move away from it because our company decided to go native on all fronts.. For internal tools/prototypes I was using JUCE for my UI needs, which is much smaller in scale that Qt, but it produced very slim executables, was fast and good enough for my needs (plus I loved the API). I still think this a great framework for small UIs and tools, es…

JUCE seems interesting. What kind of difference in executable size are we talking about, approximately?

Pretty big. If you want to use LGPL Qt you need to dynamically link, so deploying will get you around 20 MB of libraries. You can do a command line JUCE app in a few hundred KB, or a GUI app in not much more.
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