Real life use for Qt (outside of Nokia)

Is Qt an interesting platform for business apps development, ou开发者_开发技巧tside of Nokia phones ?

Why ? Strong points ?

Thanks

I like Qt because:

• Very well-designed framework, e.g. signal-slot, model-view, graphics view/scene/item/proxy, painter/paint device/paint engine..., too many to be listed here!
• Excellent documentation!
• Cross platform language/API, as well as tools like UI designer, creator, and so on.
• Rich features, e.g. graphics framework, network library, database engine, and so on.
• Active community, and active development.

There should be more. If you have ever used it, you'll find it's easy to build your framework upon Qt.

I didn't have any complain to Qt. If I have to say at least one disadvantage here, "convention". You must adopt the convention of Qt, e.g. You have to use moc to make the meta object of your objects, and it's easier for developers to use Qt's vector, list, auto_ptr than STL, tr1. But I never found any issue caused by that. On the contrary, it works very well.

In my opinion, Qt is the state-of-the-art C++ framework in this modern world!

P.S. There are a lot of commercial applications built on Qt. You can find it under Qt's official website. But I'd like add one more here: Perforce, one of the top commercial source code management tools, built its client tool on Qt for Windows/Linux/Mac.

yes it is .. just look at kde apps :)

• or see more applications made by qt
• and it has alot of bindings in many languages
• Documentation
• cross-Platform IDE

further reading

may be this is not so related to the question ... but my first deal with qt was just great starting from their well organized Documentation to their great widgets

the GraphicsView is just ammazing ! :)

It's about the only current/modern C++ gui library on Windows.

MFC is so old you have to write comments in Latin
WTL would be nice if they had finished it before abandoning it.
Winforms/WPF + managed C++/CLR - all the fun of several incompatible new technologies at once.

Bad points:
To fit on lots of platforms they have invented their own solutions to things that are now in the STL/Boost
The signal/slot mechanism - tricky to debug and silently fails (with no error) with simple typos.
Although everything is possible it's sometimes a lot of effort to do simple things (they do love MVC) compared to Winforms.

• Qt is simple
• Qt is powerful
• Qt is NATIVELY-CROSS-PLATFORM
• Qt is REALLY-CROSS-PLATFORM
• Qt is comprehensive (but the Media side of it still needs to grow)
• Qt doesn't require Garbage Collection, but it embeds a GREAT model of memory management that makes you forget about memory deallocation
• Qt is solid
• Qt is modern
• Qt proposes some new paradigm of programming that are really good (Signals-Slots)
• Qt runs a lot of VERY successful software: (Skype, Google Earth...)

Are those points strong enough?

Maybe you have heard about Google Earth which happens to be programmed in Qt too.

That aside, I like Qt for my in-house development because it

• is very well supported and documented,
• allows me to write simple and decent-looking apps that are
• works cross-platform for Windows and Linux with little effort, and
• contains nice to have components for database access, regexps, guis, xml, ...

I also use the Qwt widgets for easy real-time plotting on top of Qt.

I really dont understand whats the point in underestimating tools/frameworks which makes things easy for programmers. Qt is too good for GUI development, I would say its much better than any current existing crossplatform app development suite.

So many advantages, I have been using it for more than three years now for a product to be deployed in Linux/Win environments. The app is thread intensive and initially we had a tough time using pthreads and its conterpart for windows. Then we switched to Qt(and QThreads eventually) and things were a breeze... Backed by active development, a highly helpful and supportive community along with excellent documentation, training, certification programs, videos, forums... its easy, fast and effective to develop in Qt. You should see the video which they create a web browser in just five mins! Its really 'cross platform', and it doesnt have a software wrapper(like Java does) to enable this which makes it faster. Cmon, we all know java apps have buttons which takes a second to respond to even a simple 'click'.

I hope Qt will someday do a take on Java. :D

after all, 350000 developers cant be wrong when they chose Qt.

Pixar uses Qt (or at least, used, as of 2005) internally for certain parts of their tool suite (called "Marionette" in the marketing) collectively called Menv, ("men-vee" for Modelling ENVironment)---at least for their lighting sub-tool Lumos.