Qt 5.0 Beta 2 now available

During this year's European Qt Developer Days event, currently taking place in Berlin, the Qt developers announced the release of a second beta of version 5.0 of Qt, their cross-platform application framework. According to Lars Knoll, Qt Chief Architect at Digia, a lot of work has gone into Qt since the first 5.0 beta from the end of August, including updates to the Qt libraries as well as the associated tools.

Qt 5.0 now bundles the recent Qt Creator 2.6 release, which introduced "Kits" as a replacement for the "Targets" in previous versions; kits bundle together information about the target device, compiler, debugger and Qt version, along with other parameters, into a reusable configuration which can be defined by the user. "This release will only support Qt 5.0, but we will later examine whether and how we can add Qt 4.x support to it," said Knoll. With the new beta, the developers have also finalised the list of modules and packages that will be included in the upcoming final release of Qt 5.0. Some modules, such as Qt 3D, have been excluded from this beta, but Knoll points out that these are still available from qt-project.org and can be used together with Qt 5.0.

The developers remind users that this is a beta release and there are still a number of known issues that affect all supported platforms – a full list of these is available on the Qt Wiki. Knoll says that the planned major overhaul of the documentation for Qt 5.0 also didn't make it into this beta, so users "can still expect some larger changes in this area" in a future release. The developers anticipate publishing the final release "by the end of the year".

Further information about the second beta, including a finalised list of modules and packages, can be found in the post on the Qt Blog, while an overview of the new features in Qt 5.0 is available on the Qt 5 Features wiki page. Binaries of Qt 5.0 Beta 2 for Windows, Mac OS X, and versions 11.10 and 12.04 LTS of Ubuntu Linux, as well as source code, can be downloaded from Qt-project.org and documentation is provided. Qt is made available under the LGPL 2.1 licence.

See also:

• Android port of Qt contributed to Qt Project, a report from The H.
• Digia buys Qt, a report from The H.

(crve)