The Qt Commercial Charts 1.0.0 Final release is now available. Read on for more details on what is in the 1.0.0 release and a draft roadmap for the future development based on the inquiries and feedback we have received from the Technology Preview and Beta releases.
Qt Commercial Charts provides easy to use API to create stunning Line, Spline, Area, Scatter, Pie and Bar charts. Qt Commercial Charts works seamlessly with Qt Commercial 4.8 and latest 4.7 releases, and naturally we will support the upcoming Qt Commercial 5.0. You can use Qt Commercial Charts with both C++ and Qt Quick according to you preference. Qt Commercial charts Add-on is included in the Qt Commercial License i.e. available for existing and new customers without any additional fee.
Recap of the Qt Commercial Charts Functionality
There is a big demand for visually pleasing charts in modern user interfaces. We have designed Qt Commercial Charts to meet the needs for creating interactive chart based user interfaces – in addition to showing static data in a chart component. To address these needs we have made the components versatile and extendable.
Developing a single chart type for a single use case with Qt is relatively easy. Qt offers good drawing and data model API’s. However such custom components might be difficult to expand to support several use cases and of course they increase the maintenance burden for application developers. Developing an extendable charting library requires several man months of implementation work and finding the correct chart presentation always requires a lot of implementation before seeing results in action.
When we started thinking about the Qt Commercial charts functionality we set the initial goals to:
- Provide extendable charting library with intuitive API
- First focus on most common chart types
- The charts should have easy to use built in themes and possibility to customize the look and feel
Based on the feedback we have received from the earlier releases it seems that we have succeeded in creating a valuable add-on for the Qt Commercial users. Of course we are not able to fulfill all the chart needs, but the 1.0.0 release is a solid base for future development. Naturally, with the full source code provided and flexible Qt Commercial licensing the Qt Commercial Charts can be also used as a good starting point for building highly customized charting components.
Future development roadmap
For future development we have planned two releases for the second half of the 2012 and the preliminary content for those releases is:
- New chart types:
- Horizontal Bar Chart
- Donut chart
- Axis improvements:
- Multiple Axis support
- Logarithmic and polar axis support
- Improvements for automatic scaling of the axis
- Time series handling
- General improvements:
- Label handling in Pie
- Performance optimization
- Enhancements in animations
- New layout management
- Delivery and development:
- Qt 5 support
- Binary packaging for the SDK's
- Designer plugin for Qt Creator
- More examples and demonstration applications
Candidates for further development
- New chart Types
- Box plot (Box and Whiskers diagram)
- Radar & Cob Web diagrams
Get the Charts now
Qt Commercial Charts 1.0.0 release is now available in the Customer Portal. It is released as a source package. We will provide binary packaging in conjunction with the upcoming releases.
As always with Qt Commercial, the charts are fully covered by our standard support. If you have any issues using them, just contact our support team through the Customer Portal.
Not a Qt Commercial Customer Yet?
You can test out the Qt Commercial Charts 1.0.0 and the rest of Qt Commercial by downloading a 30-day free evaluation of Qt Commercial 4.8.2. Let us know what you think!
