The past and present of Nokia's Development Framework Qt

Editor's note: This article invites a Qt developer toartist to write a Review and Outlook article on Qt for ifanr. Nokia has also officially released the latest version 4.7 of Qt, a cross-platform application and interface development framework. This version unifies the development environment of Symbian and MeeGo. For the Symbian system, Qt 4.7 bears the heavy responsibilities of the old tree. For the MeeGo system, Qt 4.7 bears the mission of expanding the development path.

In October 21, 2010, Nokia announced its decision to use Qt as the only application development framework for Symbian and MeeGo.

So people can't help wondering, what is Qt, why is it so important to Nokia to use it as the "unique" development framework of its mobile phone platform?

Qt

Why is Qt called Qt, OT or MT?

We will first trace back to a little-known story about Qt at the end of the last century. It is said that in the bitter land of Norway in northern Europe, there is only two months of sun in a year, and the sun is usually very day, so people over there are less sun, so they are golden hair, blue eyes, the skin is white and yellow. So it's rare to enjoy the sun. There are two boring college students lying comfortably on the table and enjoying the sun. The two boys think about it, and they are also idle, why don't we get started with private activities? So I picked up a program for a company to use C ++ to develop a Unix user interface, the company still required to be transplanted to another computer in another system. The two companies finally developed a cross-platform program.

In fact, this program is very small, it is a button, it is rare that it can be pressed in many systems, or a C ++ button, then they put the program online, some people think IT is interesting to participate in the development together. At that time, IT people had a very good experience, so they did everything they needed. Then they quickly developed into a complete C ++ class library. Why do you call it Qt? It is probably because it is cute and the pronunciation of CuteQT.

So what about the two college students? Over the past few years, the college students are no longer college students. They want Qt to develop well. Let's simply sell it to NLP, as a result, they partnered with a company called Trolltech in Oslo to develop Qt, which was not smooth at the beginning and could not be sold. It turned out that Qt had been forged by a group of cool people in the open-source community, it's so advanced that most people don't use it, so they try to simplify the interface and turn it into a silly development tool, which is the advantage that Qt has been promoting:

 
 

  
  
Code Less, Create More and deploy everywhere. 
 
 

In this way, a technical director of a medical instrument company, after studying the source code of Qt, finally asked them to sell the first commercial license for Qt. Therefore, this great product has been slowly formed after a lot of hardships, and to take a long time, we must have a good idea at the beginning. Let's look at the MFC of the same period, how many C ++ programmers are so angry that they are inherently inadequate and unable to continue. Later, there was an episode in which Trolltech took him in and acted as a guest when the technology director was driven out of the mountain by the company, from this, we can see a trace of human brilliance of the founder of Qt and the company culture that can be imagined as harmonious as Trolltech.

So Qt has gone so far in the open-source community that it has a close relationship with the open-source community. Free Open-source software can use Qt for free, so Qt continues to play its unlimited potential in the open-source community, it has created one great open-source software, including a big bully and a KDE of the entire graphic system. From this perspective, smart people have learned that Qt has another great advantage: it has a large number of open source support, making development easier.

Why Does Nokia want to buy Qt?

Speaking of this, we still don't understand why Nokia wants to buy Qt, because at this time, Qt is only mixed on the desktop platform, and it has been developing slowly for several years, and PDAs have started to become popular, in line with the deploy everywehre principle, PDAs also need to be cross-cutting, So we began to develop Qt embedded in the device version. Here, Qt once again integrated a set of embedded KDE by leveraging the power of the open-source community, it is the Qtopia that embedded programmers know. This great product even surpasses Qt itself to some extent. Most of the domestic old Qt programmers deal with it, its popularity is beyond the reach of other embedded operating systems. As a result, Nokia, the mobile phone industry that is suffering a huge blow from the iPhone, is favored by Qt because of Qtopia. It is just like a parent from Norway and Finland in northern Europe who acquired Qt to share the sun And watch beautiful women.

Why Qt?

So how much has Qt changed after Nokia's acquisition of TrollTech? Speaking of this, Nokia is worthy of being a big company, and international companies have made extraordinary moves, starting from 4.5, first, we fully integrated the Qt embedded version and added the Symbian support. We made great efforts to optimize the underlying layer based on the disadvantages of insufficient Qt running speed, which greatly improved the Qt performance, it has increased the speed by more than doubled. At the same time, it has proposed an advanced Kinetic project plan, that is, QtQuick in the current 4.7. Speaking of this, we need to mention Microsoft. net has developed the advanced UI component WPF. The separation of design and code and data-driven development allow us to work seamlessly with programmers. This has made Microsoft proud for several years. However, from the perspective of the author, this component of Qt is more eye-catching for three reasons:

◆ The fully open-source development model based on C ++ has benefited a large number of C ++ developers who are eager to answer questions.

◆ Added enhanced javascript as a dynamic language to fit the current popular development model, and the C-style Syntax of javascript also makes the C ++ programmer smooth transition, compared to other similar Ruby, python and other applications are more comfortable, and the additional data binding and seamless integration with C ++ extensions are easier to use than WPF. It truly achieves rapid development without losing the efficiency of the program.

◆ Due to the cross-platform nature of Qt, QtQuick will be more widely used in the future. Apart from Nokia's main mobile phones and tablet platforms, due to the script file-based development method and even the use of web applications, QtQuick has unlimited potential. As a developer, I would like to extend my high respect to the designers of QtQuick.

I introduced the most important things Nokia has brought to Qt. So what else can I do for you. Qt 4.5 has added a component named phonon, which comes from an open-source project in KDE. The powerful open-source community has contributed a well-designed library for Qt, the development of multimedia programs can be completed with dozens of lines of code. The spirit that Qt has been pursuing has once again been a perfect embodiment, but Nokia's developers are not satisfied, in addition, a multimedia library was added to 4.6 for lower-layer multimedia development. It's so full that programmers at Qt are crazy.

There is also a webkit that has to be mentioned, which is an open-source browser engine that shines on Apple browsers. Qt naturally cannot let it go, the webkit of Qt allows Qt developers to build their own browsers or do web-related programs with just a few lines of code. I can't help but lament that with Qt, writing code is really fun.

QTLive

In terms of mobile phones, Nokia has done more, and a mobile Qt component is gradually improved. It encapsulates the underlying operating system of Nokia mobile phones, provides a unified interface for operating all aspects of mobile phones, including cameras, text messages, and various sensors of smart phones, in this regard, Qt surpassed google's Android and Apple's fully-closed iPhone development framework. So the ambition of Qt, which has the support of a huge open-source force, is not limited to Nokia's family, qt has two branch versions for the iPhone's Qt-iPhone and Android-Lighthouse for Android-riod, which are quietly under development.

At this point, I am a C ++ developer, so I can't help but enjoy it. Just as Android chose java, while the iPhone uses object-c, we use the great Qt, it will certainly be above all platforms.

From the past we can see that now, let's look into the future of Qt with the powerful support of Nokia.

Nokia has already set Roadmap for Qt. I won't talk much about other comprehensive support, except that the committed code optimization will be better with the support of the open-source community, the next generation of widgets will be built on QtQuick, and programmers who have always thought that Qt GUI is not innovative can see Qt's efforts. In this regard, Qt is not inferior to the development framework of iPhone and Android, and will do better in the future. From the bold and excellent design of QtQuick, we can see that Qt has changed the UI into an art. If you are a C ++ programmer, Qt is the development tool you dream of. It can increase your development efficiency by five times. Qt does not only belong to C ++, but also has java interfaces and python interfaces before Nokia's acquisition. So if you are confused and helpless with numerous messy development tools, why can you refuse the Qt invitation from Nokia?