Digia launches Qt 5 cross-platform application development and UI framework

Digia has stated its intention to make Qt the world’s leading cross-platform development framework. Qt 5 is the next step on this journey to deliver the best user experience, both for application developers and the users of the products that they create. Qt 5 simplifies developers’ lives by enabling them to produce applications faster with intuitive user interfaces for multiple targets. It also makes it easier to address the paradigm shifts that touchscreens and tablets require.

Key benefits of Qt 5 include: graphics quality; performance on constrained hardware; cross-platform portability; support for C++11; HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2; a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs; ease of use and compatibility with Qt 4 versions.

Qt’s ability to deliver impressive graphics has been enhanced with the use of OpenGL ES (the version of the graphics application programming interface designed specifically for embedded systems and mobile devices). This makes it easier to develop and deploy rich graphics with velvet-like animations and transitions as well as smoothly-rendered 2D and 3D animations on high-end architectures as well as on devices with relatively limited performance, such as mobile phones, tablets and low-cost development platforms including Raspberry Pi.

Cross-platform portability is made even simpler in Qt 5 due to a new modularized code base, consisting of essentials and add-on modules, which enable the system code size to be reduced. The consolidation of the Qt Platform Abstraction layer also emphasizes cross-platform portability by enabling the ease of development for multiple-target deployment, bringing freedom to the developer.

Qt supports all major desktop operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, embedded operating systems such as embedded Linux, Windows Embedded as well as the most widely deployed real-time operating systems for embedded devices – VxWorks, Neutrino and INTEGRITY – and popular mobile OSes.

The Qt WebKit 2 integrated browser engine allows easy integration of web content and applications. It will make HTML5 developers feel at home and enable hybrid applications to be developed that combine the responsiveness and power of native code with large amounts of dynamic content.

Migrating applications developed against the previous Qt version 4 is straight forward, mainly requiring a simple recompilation.

“Qt 5.0 is the first major Qt release Digia has put out since acquiring the full Qt rights from Nokia earlier this autumn. We are happy to release Qt 5.0 together with the Qt Project and are pleased that we have been able to quickly and successfully integrate our development teams immediately after the acquisition process to deliver this anticipated Qt release. Qt 5.0 marks the beginning of the new Qt strategy and serves as the foundation for the further development of Qt,” said Tommi Laitinen, Senior Vice President, Digia.