Qt Software, a division Nokia, has released Qt 4.5.0, the first major release of the cross-platform GUI toolkit to be licensed under the LGPL and it ships with a new IDE for a complete SDK.
Together Qt 4.5 and Qt Creator 1.0 combine to form the new Qt SDK bundle which is also available under the GPL and a commercial licence.
What makes the LGPL significant for developers is proprietary applications can be created on top of Qt without paying a licensing fee.
Qt is used extensively for cross-platform applications by software companies including Adobe and Google and for open source projects like KDE.
Nokia's Qt Software chief technologist Benoit Schillings said with the performance improvements in Qt, the introduction of Qt Creator, and the release of the Qt SDK, developers looking for a native or a hybrid native-Web application framework now have “the power and flexibility they need”.
Qt 4.5 brings “significant” performance enhancements, better integration with the WebKit rendering engine – including Netscape Plugin API support for Flash, more advanced Web UI effects and a new JavaScript engine – and a port to Apple’s Cocoa framework.
Previously Qt supported only the Carbon framework, but with Qt 4.5, Qt can now support both, meaning developers can create applications that support 32- or 64-bit, Intel or PowerPC Mac binaries from a single source.
Qt Creator 1.0, also LGPL, claims to be the first IDE designed specifically for cross-platform development and includes a C++ code editor, context-aware help, a visual debugger, source code management, and project and build management tools.
Available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, Qt Creator, Qt Creator will be released for embedded platforms this year.
Qt Software also announced it will be launching a Qt Contribution Web site “in the coming weeks”, to allow developers to see the Qt code repository and contribute code to Qt and its associated projects.
The standalone product, Qt Extended, will be discontinued with selected features migrated into the main Qt framework.
The final release of Qt Extended will be version 4.4.3, which will is planned for release on March 5, 2009. It will be maintained for one year from that date.