Submitted by “Silvan Scherrer and Dmitry A. Kuminov have released the GA of the port of the Qt 4 application framework to OS/2 and eComStation, i.e., version 4.5.1 GA. The new release comes with complete support for drag and drop, session management, SQLite3, and includes the Qt Designer application.”
Qt really is starting to take over the world
Ya, but unlike google’s take over of the planet, I am actually thrilled with QT’s movement. It’s about as good as it gets.
I am actually more excited over the fact that eCS is alive and progressing well (it could do better though)
Edited 2010-02-12 22:03 UTC
I donated to this to get the port done and it’s nice. It opens doors all sorts of apps. There is a nice Qt4 port of SMPlayer working nicely.
Perhaps its more proper to say the QT operating system now supports the OS/2 – eComStation kernel?
I do think it is more proper to say the QT operating system rather then a toolkit. QT in effect is its own windowing system, there is virtually nothing used of the underlying NATIVE OS, all controls, widgets, etc are drawn by QT, in that they ONLY EMULATE THE NATIVE OPERATING SYSTEM. Look at the QT source, about all of the native system used is a blank window frame, then qt draws to a buffer, and this buffer is dumped to the screen. QT replaces just about everything about the native OS with its own system, it replaces threading, file handling, etc…
QT is about as freaking bloated as you can get, Microsoft .net is absolutely svelte compared to QT.
You have completely misunderstood Qt. It is not its own windowing system, it uses the native windowing system on the desktop. It does draw its own controls, just like nearly every other toolkit, but it will use the underlying system to do it if it can (Aqua, Aero, etc). Yes it double buffers, because that eliminates flicker. “Alien” widgets are a huge improvement in speed, especially on X11. It doesn’t replace file system and threading, it provides an C++ API on the native systems.
You imply that .NET does not do any of this, but that is wrong. Way down deep .NET is still using win32, gdi, low level files and threads, etc.
Oh Really?,… Have you looked into the QT source code? I have, and I have the deep pain of using it a few years ago to develop a so called “cross platform application”.
About all that QT uses of the native operating system is a window frame. Thats it, period. It calls the native operating system to create a window frame, then it has a pixbuff that it draws everything to, then the pixbuff is displayed in the window frame. QT uses its own “theming engine” to render controls. This is perfectly fine on Linux where QT IS THE NATIVE TOOLKIT, but bad on Windows, and an absolute disaster on the Mac.
We ended up scrapping the entire QT effort because the applications felt alien on the Windows and Mac, and ended up re-writting the UI with C# on Windows, and Cocoa on the Mac. This is the only way to write decent cross platform apps, and not short change your users: a cross platform core logic, in c++, and NATIVE UIs in C# and Cocoa.