Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support • Hacker News Board

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#11

Post by purringmeow » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:14 PM UTC

yapcguy wrote: post #7

> You can download a 30-day trial of Qt Enterprise from Digia’s Qt site (version 5.2 is slowly trickling out throughout the day). The open source version can meanwhile be snagged from Qt Project. Does anybody know the difference between the Enterprise and Open Source versions? Is it just tech support or is the Open Source version going to lack the features we really need?

The only difference is support I believe.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#12

Post by stusmall » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:17 PM UTC

Does anyone have more info on what the Android/iOS support is like? Does it give native style low level binding ala Mono or does it try to be a generic API that is a write once run everywhere kind of thing?

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#13

Post by c0g » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:18 PM UTC

Can I call a Java library (say, google play services) from Qt without having to jump through JNI hoops?

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#14

Post by kbutler » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:24 PM UTC

yapcguy wrote: post #7

> You can download a 30-day trial of Qt Enterprise from Digia’s Qt site (version 5.2 is slowly trickling out throughout the day). The open source version can meanwhile be snagged from Qt Project. Does anybody know the difference between the Enterprise and Open Source versions? Is it just tech support or is the Open Source version going to lack the features we really need?

The license is the critical feature: the open source version is available under GPL and LGPL. Beware of the implications for iOS development with GPL/LGPL (have to distribute source or .o files for your application).

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#15

Post by dljsjr » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:41 PM UTC

c0g wrote: post #13

Can I call a Java library (say, google play services) from Qt without having to jump through JNI hoops?

At it's heart, Qt is basically a C++ framework/library, so it's just like invoking Java from regular C++ code.

In other words, JNI is involved.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#16

Post by cheez » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:46 PM UTC

stusmall wrote: post #12

Does anyone have more info on what the Android/iOS support is like? Does it give native style low level binding ala Mono or does it try to be a generic API that is a write once run everywhere kind of thing?

Write once, run anywhere kind of thing.

Accessing native functionality is actually not easy. I'm sure they will be addressing this at some point.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#17

Post by _ZeD_ » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 4:48 PM UTC

dariopy wrote: post #2

Does this mean we can create Android and iOS apps with Python (via e.g. PyQt)?

yes, but ATM there is lack of documentation:

http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/pipermail/pyqt/2013-Decemb...

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#18

Post by zura » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 5:15 PM UTC

Lets hope that tools and frameworks like this will be widely adopted, thus more and more jobs requiring these skills, rather than that crap, over-engineered "native" SDKs/frameworks...

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#19

Post by matthewmacleod » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 5:26 PM UTC

zura wrote: post #18

Lets hope that tools and frameworks like this will be widely adopted, thus more and more jobs requiring these skills, rather than that crap, over-engineered "native" SDKs/frameworks...

The modern Android and iOS SDKs are both really quite nice. There are obviously weak spots in both, but neither could really be described as "crap" or "over-engineered." I'm not familiar with WinRT.

Still, Qt is pretty impressive. The main problems it suffers from are it's weight, and the issue that all cross-platform frameworks suffer from, in that the GUIs never feel quite right.

Re: Digia releases Qt 5.2 with Android and iOS support

#20

Post by stusmall » Wed, Dec 11, 2013, 5:31 PM UTC

zura wrote: post #18

Lets hope that tools and frameworks like this will be widely adopted, thus more and more jobs requiring these skills, rather than that crap, over-engineered "native" SDKs/frameworks...

What's over engineered about Android? I work with it daily and find it quite nice and it really didn't take too much effort to dive into.

Also if you want something small and simple, I think QT might be the wrong tree to bark up. I've only used it on casually used it on desktop but it is not a small framework.