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I second that! I really enjoy QT. It puts the fun back into programming. Especially since I am a Java developer and are so sick and tired of all the Swing issues.

The article was written yesterday. Deal with it.

Yeah it all depends on whether the classes are worth the money. As a C++ developer, Qt is easily worth the money. It is so far above any other C++ toolkit out there that I believe I get my money back in gained productivity very quickly.
In Java you already have classes for network/sql/xml/file/etc access in the standard class library so a lot of Qt is not strictly necessary.

Trolltech seems to realize this and charges significantly less for Jambi than the C++ version of Qt ($1780-$3560 vs $3300-$6600).

This is often missed by people who refer to Qt as "GUI Toolkit".

Qt is to C++ what the Java Classlibrary is to Java.
So obviously on Java, where it basically is just a "GUI Toolkit", there is a lot less need for it.

Interestingly, dispite only a small portion of Qt being of additional value for a Java developer, it is still considered for just its GUI portion.

True, I guess. However, it being a runtime means that any number of "small apps" can use the same libs and therefore the argument lessens. What needs to happen is bundling ala DotNet. Love it or hate it, it is a classic example of a large runtime that doesn't seem so large after you begin installing apps to use it.

EDIT:: woohoo!! OSNews doesn't detect MicroB on the N800 is a mobile browser and so we don't get stupid ass mobie pages with crippled login functionality!!! Stoked about that. Viva la revolucion!

Edited 2007-12-07 21:29

Regarding GUI fidelity, Qt looks native both on OSX and windows (linux being of course a different topic since there is no such thing as a default toolkit)

Actually there are plenty of apps that are Qt based (for instance Opera, Skype) that many people don't even know are Qt apps.

Edited 2007-12-07 10:58

Actually, Opera looks very obviously un-Mac-like and Skype... Skype on OS X looks and behaves perfectly as if it were a native app, even including Core Image transitions! Of course... that is because for Mac OS X they rewrote the GUI code using Cocoa

edit: spelling

Edited 2007-12-07 13:54

Opera is not Qt based. They use Qt for menus only. The actual theme engine is their own.

Yes, menus, but more importantly, printing support. Printing support is hard to do, and they didn't want to reinvent the wheel. The rest of the UI is built on their custom in-house cross platform toolkit.

Actually, Qt is cheap and cheaper.

It is cheap because it boosts your development process. You are 3 or 4 times more productive using Qt than not using it.

And it is cheaper because those 1480 EUR/platform/developer are to buy, renewal is about 1/3 of that.

Did I say at my company we develop software using Qt and we do have commercial licenses?

Edited 2007-12-07 11:09

But you are using C++, right? The question is whether the productivity boosts that come with Qt-Jambi transfer to Java which already has GUI toolkits that appear to be similar.

I have no doubt that Qt is better than any C++ GUI toolkit (like wxWidgets, MFC or some other obscure toolkit). As I've said, just looking at the line count from the examples that come with Qt-Jambi, what jumps out at me is how similar the code looks to Swing.

But you are using C++, right? The question is whether the productivity boosts that come with Qt-Jambi transfer to Java which already has GUI toolkits that appear to be similar.

The reason why Trolltech thinks there will be a market for Jambi, particularly from the GUI point of view because Qt is a lot more than GUI libraries, is because Swing and SWT are crap - quite frankly.

Sun still haven't sorted out Swing over the last ten years, and the code and development required for it is like swallowing a large breeze block as well as not fitting into the desktop environment right - even with Gnome!

SWT took the direction of reimplementing itself natively on every platform - Win32, GTK and Mac. The problem with this can be seen very clearly when you view the bugs list in Eclipse and SWT that a handful of IBM developers are going red in the face trying to squash. Bugs that don't appear on Win32 but appear in GTK and Mac, and obscure bugs that mean that cross-platform apps aren't very cross-platform at all. They also don't integrate very well with the desktop either.

Certainly from a GUI point of view, Qt is light-years ahead of just about anything, but particularly in the Java world.

To be fair, any cross-platform toolkit is going to have some of these problems. You can't guarantee 100% that a certain OS at a certain patch level won't cause bugs in something as complex as a cross platform GUI toolkit.
That said, all my Qt apps are built for clients running Windows, and yet I do all my development on Linux. Then, when I'm ready to do a release, I reboot into windows, recompile (qmake, nmake release), and create the Windows version. So far I haven't had any bugs on Windows that weren't already identified on Linux.

> The reason why Trolltech thinks there will be a
> market for Jambi, particularly from the GUI point
> of view because Qt is a lot more than GUI libraries,
> is because Swing and SWT are crap - quite frankly.

Well, Swing is not crap. It does lack some advanced widgets. But, there are third party component libraries (both open source and commercial) that make up for that. And the commercial ones are significantly cheaper than Qt is.

> well as not fitting into the desktop environment
> right - even with Gnome!

You haven't seen a Java 6 app running on GNOME recently have you? I'd be willing to bet you can't tell the difference between a well written Swing app on GNOME and a native GTK app on GNOME. The last two updates to Java 6 have made the GNOME support extremely good in Java.

And as I said, the latest version of Java Swing looks and feels more native on Windows than the latest version of Qt does. It also looks and feels more native on GNOME than the latest version of Qt does, even with GNOME's attempts at skinning a Qt app to look like a GNOME app.

3 to 4 times as productive eh? Care to substantiate that? At a certain level, object oriented GUI toolkits all work pretty much the same.

"""
Care to substantiate that?
"""

I can't comment on QT. But I've been using PyGTK, and it made my teeth 37% whiter in just 2 weeks! ;-)

I don't know if you use OS X, but as a full time OS X user, swing applicantion can't lie. They never look nativ and you can always spot a swing application without knowing it is in java. It behave differently, generic windows tools are completly foreign (like the file chooser) and they are slower (when you which between tab to diffent menu.) If you want a swing application to look good on each platform, a lot of work is required.

Anyway, SWT writes on their site that it look native on every plateform. First thing you notice, ugly tabs that make application looks odd.

Productivity:
Gui designer in swing are well done (netbeans), swt are a total disaster. Qt designer is an incredible productity booster and is fun to use.

Their tools are so good, I think trolltech could give Q for free, reach a higher marker share. Then base their business on support and developpement tools. But anyway, they probably already think about it.

"They can get away with such pricing in the C++ world because C++ lacks a viable cross platform GUI development library."

Not true.

wxWidgets

and

Gtkmm

are both free, cross platform C++ GUI toolkits. Also, Gtkmm is essentially C++ wrapper classes on top of regular Gtk, which also can be used by itself in C++ applications.

So your point that Qt has been successful in the C++ world because a lack of cross platform C++ GUI toolkits holds less weight. IMO, Qt has been successful because of it's dual licensing (free for open source projects), the fact that KDE uses it, and it's overall excellence, which makes the propietary price tag easier to swallow (look at Google Earth, Skype, and Adobe Photoshop as great proprietary Qt programs).

Nonetheless, your point is well taken. I kind of doubt that Jambi will gain much traction, simply because Java devs already have Swing (which rapidly improving these days - after years of Sun neglect), and they have SWT (the Eclipse plstform is practically a de-facto standard for tools).

That said, I do think that Qt is a superior library to Swing or SWT. I just don't think that Qt Jambi will gain much of a user base. But it is nice for Java desktop developers to have another viable choice.

wxWidgets and gtkmm (and other obscure stuff like FLTK) are hardly in the same league as Qt. GTK on OS X and Windows has been the butt of many jokes. Having a C++ wrapper around isn't going to make it any better.

That leaves wxWidgets which is the most viable contender. I have tried to love wxWidgets. IMHO, it tries too hard to be MFC. Qt's signal and slots mechanism is better than wxWidgets MFC style message maps. They have introduced signals and slots in recent versions but this feels like the red headed stepchild that nobody likes. Most of the examples and documentation still deal with the message map.

Another thing that is lacking for wxWidgets is a decent GUI designer. Qt-Designer on the other hand is awesome sauce. I used it for Java(thanks to http://uic.sourceforge.net/) and I have mostly praise for it. wxWidgets lacks something like this.

The documentation for Qt, the design and the tools are better than the competition. This is what makes it so successful. The dual licensing scheme just makes things sweeter, allowing you to experiment with it for free while writing open source applications and paying for a license when going commercial. Being free (both libre and gratis) has not helped gtkmm or any of the other obscure C++ libraries. wxWidgets is more popular mainly because it provides a much more viable alternative to Qt than the others.

wxWidgets has good GUI designers like wxFormBuilder or wxDevc++.

> Being free (both libre and gratis) has not helped
> gtkmm or any of the other obscure C++
> libraries. wxWidgets is more popular mainly because
> it provides a much more viable alternative to Qt
> than the others.

I wouldn't say that gtkmm is obscure, and it provides a very nice alternative to Qt. In fact, gtkmm does a better job of "feeling" C++ like than any others in my opinion.

Also being free has definitely helped Gtk in general. It's the main reason why all the commercial *nix vendors threw their support behind GNOME instead of KDE. None of them wanted to lock their commercial partners into paying huge licensing fees for Qt.

Yeah, but who cares about "feeling C++ like"? That's not an advantage, that's a detriment. I want productivity and intuitive APIs, not a C++ feel. GTKmm is not exactly a contender on any other platform than Linux anyway.



Absolutely, if it wasn't free, why would you want to use it at all?



A common myth, but there really isn't much evidence for that. SuSe supports both equally, Redhat does Gnome, Xandros does KDE (millions of installs on the EeePC alone), Linspire does KDE, and Ubuntu does Gnome (although they're not really commercial). And running KDE doesn't mean you're locked into Qt at all. You can write apps with any toolkit/language just fine.

So that explains the thriving market for commercial gtk-based applications, I guess.

RH, Novell and Sun each had strategic business reasons behind selecting gtk, it has nothing to do with license pricing. Particularly considering that these are businesses that rely on providing high-value in order to generate support revenue from customers for a product they could otherwise get for gratis, it's a little bit galling to suggest that they believe Qt isn't viable under what is basically the same model.

At the end of the day, businesses have no issue paying for tools if they can be shown to make them more efficient. Price is only a single factor in the value equation, and if the cases of commercial organizations, it is often one of the least important ones.

If Qt with support from Trolltech can make a developer more efficient and cut down code development time, the company will see near immediate ROI. The equation can change dramatically in Qt's favor when considering the cross-platform development capabilities, as well. That's how they'll make their decisions.

I will admit, though, that Gtk has an important role to play as a viable alternative to Qt, if only to offer choice.

In fact, gtkmm does a better job of "feeling" C++ like than any others in my opinion.

I don't think that qualifies as an 'advantage'.

I agree with everything you say. Qt is head and shoulders, as an overall GUI (and other) library, and tool set, above wxWidgets, Gtk/Gtkmm, or MFC, or anything else out there.

I think Qt is superior to Swing or SWT, as well. It looks better, it blends with the native environment better, it's faster (much faster in many cases), it's tools are better (although Swing's Matisse is pretty close to Qt Designer, I must say), and it's overall easier to develop with than either Swing or SWT.

Whether that's enough to get existing Java devs to use it in future desktop applications remains to be seen. Certainly, existing Qt/C++ programmers that want to use Java instead of C++ will want to use it.

Qt-Designer on the other hand is awesome sauce. I used it for Java(thanks to http://uic.sourceforge.net/) and I have mostly praise for it. wxWidgets lacks something like this.

Wow, I had no idea that a version of Qt Designer for Swing existed! Amazing!!

Of course, someone could point out some super-major-killer-feature of Jambi that I've left out that makes it all worthwhile in the end ...

Well, Designer is pretty freaking sweet. That one's pretty huge. It's also pretty awesome that you will (in the future) be able to make Java applications that blend in with KDE themes. So that may make it popular in the open-source world, at least.

Swing sucks in KDE. I will admit that. Their KDE support is awful unless you use a third party theme.

Load it up in GNOME though, and set the UIManager to use the system look and feel, and you won't be able to tell the difference between a native GNOME app and the Swing app (presuming you are using a relatively recent version of Java 6.)

Of topic. As a fellow Finder hater I have to ask. Is anyone aware of an easy to install finder replacement?

You are more pathetic for giving a $hit about modding :-)

Highly unlikely, unless you started reading about five minutes ago.