Trolltech launches Qt 4.4 release candidate

Trolltech has launched a release candidate of Qt 4.4 in antipation of the full new version of the platform independent C++ library, scheduled for the beginning of May. The Norwegian software company was recently taken over by Nokia. The RC source code is available for download for Windows, Linux and Apple Mac.

Qt 4.4, which was already announced for the first quarter of 2008 at the Trolltech Developer Days last October, incorporates the WebKit browser engine as a module called QtWebKit. WebKit was created by KDE developers, and is the basis for browsers like Safari. It supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.1, XML, CSS 2.1, JavaScript 1.5, large portions of SVG 1.2 and a little CSS 3. The ported Qt version of WebKit can display Web 2.0 content in Qt applications - and also for embedding Qt widgets in web pages.

The new multimedia framework is also based on a KDE project, Phonon. Under Windows it uses DirectShow, under Linux GStreamer and on the Mac Quicktime for audio and video playback. The programming interface doesn't come with its own codecs, but is reported to make it much easier to use third party codecs.

The upgraded XML module goes beyond mere compliance with the XQuery 1.0 standard. The new concurrency framework makes multi-thread programming easier; programmers can run many simple tasks without synchronisation constructs like mutexes, semaphores or wait conditions. The new interprocess communication framework provides new classes for exclusive shared memory access and management. The QHelpSystem offers programmers more options for embedding help texts and wizards into their applications.

(trk)