The new Qt goes declarative

Thursday, 23 September 2010

Nokia has released a new version of the Qt framework that includes QML, a new declarative language based on Javascript that can be used to define a UI.

Nokia has an updated release of the Qt framework. The new version was talked about at the recent Nokia World as one of the reasons why programmers should develop apps for Nokia phones.

nokia

The key new feature of Qt 4.7 is Qt Quick, an easy-to- use UI builder consisting of three technologies:

QML is a declarative language based on JavaScript that uses Qt's Meta-Object capabilities.
QtDeclarative is a C++ library that provides the engine, which translates the declarative description of the UI in QML into items on a QGraphicsScene. The library also provides APIs to bind custom C++ types and elements to QML, and to connect the QML UI with the underlying application logic written in C++.
Qt Creator has been improved to support interactive editing of QML UIs through drag-and-drop.

Also new is the "Bearer Management API", which provides more access to and control of the connected state of the phone. The QtWebKit classes have been improved to speed things up by using hardware graphics acceleration and better scrolling and zooming. Nokia also claim speedups for a range of other facilities including Javascript execution.

You can download source and binary packages for Qt 4.7.0 (and binaries for the corresponding Qt SDK 2010.05) from the Qt Download Page. Alternatively, you can grab the source directly from the public repository, where the “v4.7.0″ tag matches the released packages. You can also check out the Qt 4.7 documentation.

Further Reading