Despite all the troubles surrounding the Qt ecosystem recently, the first beta of the next major update to the framework has just been released.
The first beta of Qt 5 comes 15 months after Qt 5 was first announced, and includes all the planned architectural changes. The major changes that Qt 5 brings are:
- A re-architectured graphics stack that takes better advantage of new features such as QML and Qt Quick. Qt Quick is now an integral part of Qt.
- All ports of Qt are based on Lighthouse, a new Qt technology that provides abstractions that make it easier to port Qt to new platforms. The Necessitas port released a few days ago is also based on this.
- A modularized repository structure which allows applications to include only specific parts of Qt, and also allows external add-ons to Qt.
- Separation of the QWidget functionality into its own library so that applications that use the newer QML-based UI’s don’t need to include it.
Qt 5 extensively features hardware acceleration in order provide a more fluid UI, allowing less powerful devices to perform better while using up less power. It is much better for tablets and mobiles now, and in fact the Qt Mobility code is not merged and better integrated. QML in Qt 5 now uses Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, and as such perform much better. Qt 5 also adds a number of new modules, such as support for “JSON, mimetype recognition, standard paths”.
Best of all Qt 5 maintains backwards compatibility with Qt 4 allowing all current code to be easily adapted for it. A script is available that can automate the minor adaptations that are needed by the code.
You can read more about the new features Qt 5 brings, and the aim of this new release here and you can download Qt 5 for your platform from here.
