Nokia has released Qt 4.7, the latest version of its cross-platform application and UI framework. A key feature of Qt 4.7 is QML (Qt Meta-Object-Language), an easy to learn, declarative language that describes the interface of a program and how it behaves. QML will be familiar to developers who prefer scripting type languages such as Javascript and it allows UI designers and developers to work together in an iterative approach.
Qt 4.7 includes significant performance improvements that make applications and user interfaces run faster and smoother, including:
- New hardware accelerated compositing in QtWebkit has accelerated QtWebkit animation rendering by 31% over Qt 4.6.0, resulting in snappier Uis.
- In benchmark tests of popular websites, Facebook pages scrolled up to 67 percent faster, and other, less complicated pages scrolled on average 350 percent faster due to significant scrolling speed improvements in QtWebkit. (Test results taken from a 64-bit Linux workstation with the raster graphics system.)
- The new QStaticText class makes text render more than twice as fast as in Qt 4.6.0.
- The QPainter engine makes it possible to draw particle systems more efficiently in OpenGL.
An updated Qt SDK that contains Qt 4.7, Qt Creator 2.0.1 and everything developers need to create applications and to easily re-use the code across the Qt supported platforms. It can be downloaded here.
Included in Qt 4.7 is an update to Qt's Visual Studio Add-in Integration. The Qt Visual Studio Add-in is now also available under the Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) version 2.1.
