Trolltech Qt

Cross-platform UI Development

Trolltech's Qt is the answer to cross-platform ui development. Prior to Qt, the answers were ugly -

  • Settle for an emulator interface that emulates only one platform,
  • Settle for a generic interface that doesn't look quite like any platform,
  • Or roll up your sleeves and devote perhaps many man-years of effort to abstract your own.

With Qt, none of those are options, anymore (and we've had extensive experience with all of the above.)

Qt presents a user interface on each supported platform that looks like, behaves like, and fits into the native gui like a natively written app. And it accomplishes this using C++ with C++ performance and compactness, allowing you to maintain a single source code base for your gui.

That can cut literally man-years off a cross-platform development project.

Rich Feature Set

Qt has support for many different kinds of windowing constructs - tables, listviews, all the dialog permutations you would expect, collapsible tree lists, dockable toolbars, and on. And they look and behave just as you would expect them to on the native platform.

Custom ui items are possible, too. The framework provides for low-level access to build up ui items as needed.

More Than a UI Kit

Qt has a solid infrastructure well suited to building large, complex applications on multiple platforms. At the core, there is an extensive suite of collections and objects that parallel the C++ STL (and can be accessed with the same interface), but are uniformly supported across all supported platforms.

Qt's signal-slot mechanism (somewhat analogous to Java's Actions/Action Listeners mechanism or or Objective C's messaging mechanism) can be used on other than ui components to achieve true run-time binding in C++, and wonderfully loose coupling, that goes a long way to providing object/component isolation.

In the enterprise version, Qt also bundles in it's own XML, HTTP, abstracted database interfaces, and other useful functionality. This is very useful - you don't have to bring in difficult-to-maintain third-party libraries (or licenses, when applicable.)

More Information

You can get much more information on the website of Qt's creators: TrollTech Software.

When you're ready to implement, contact KIS Systems.