Towards Qt 5.0

It’s been now some days since we released the Qt 5 beta, and thus it is time to look ahead to what’s going to happen in the next few months and the plans for the Qt 5.0.0 final version release.

Moving to Digia

The first important thing is that the planned transfer of Qt from Nokia to Digia is anticipated to be finalized in Q3. I personally have also chosen to join Digia and continue my work on Qt from there. Having now had quite a few talks with Digia, I believe this is going to be a great opportunity both for Qt and for the development teams in Oslo and Berlin.

From all I can see, Digia has a solid, long-term strategy with Qt, focusing strongly on the product, pushing for Qt 5 and making Qt the best possible development tool out there. This is a large acquisition for Digia, which underlines how strategic they believe Qt will be for them in the future.

Digia wants to grow the Qt ecosystem together with other players in the market. They understand the importance of keeping that ecosystem unified. They also understand how important dual licensing is for the Qt ecosystem.

The teams planned to transfer from Nokia will be a significant addition to the business unit that is currently selling Qt Commercial. The people coming from Nokia are, to a large extent, developers and the former Nokia teams will actually form the majority of the development team in Digia.

Of course, there will be changes for the Nokia Qt people joining Digia, but I do believe that they will be changes for the better. These changes will include a broader focus on customer needs and a more immediate feedback cycle from our customers to development. This is something I’m personally looking forward to.

But some things are planned to stay the same. We aim to continue the strong focus on product development and pushing the boundaries of what can be done with Qt. Qt 5 is planned to be be the central focus of most of our work, both short and longer term.

Finalizing the Qt 5.0 release

One of the most important things to do in the short term now is to finalize Qt 5. The Qt 5 beta has now added binary packages for the main platforms, but it is still missing some pieces. We are aiming at including Qt Creator into the Qt 5.0 release and creating a package that is similar to the Qt SDK packages we have released for 4.x.

We had a workshop on Monday in Oslo trying to identify the work that remains to be done. Apart from general bug fixing a couple of items clearly showed up, and we will strongly focus on these for the next couple of weeks:

• Documentation

  While the individual class documentation is in an OK state, lots of work remains to be done to tie it all together. We are lacking overview documentation, intros to Qt and the different modules, some getting started help and a good landing page. Making the difference between Qt Essentials and Add-ons clear, as well as cross-referencing between modules still requires work. We have now a team in Oslo that will focus on putting all of this in place.

• Examples and Demos

  A lot of the existing examples in Qt have been there for a long time. We will go through the list and do a cleanup of the examples, probably removing a large part of them in the process and focusing on having a small but high quality set of examples available for Qt 5.0.

• Finishing and testing our reference platforms

  This is mainly bug fixing and testing, but nevertheless extremely important. On some platforms we will need to do some more work than on others.

  On Windows, we will change the default build to use ANGLE (OpenGL on top of DirectX) to avoid issues with bad OpenGL drivers and remote desktop. In addition this will make the Multimedia and WebKit integration easier and with improved performance. Of course, building against the regular desktop OpenGL drivers will still be supported.

  On Mac and Linux, there’s also work required to finish the multimedia integration as well as many other smaller issues.

  WebKit 2 and the QML module for WebKit have been disabled for the beta. The WebKit team is now very close to having this work on all reference platforms.

• Qt Creator

  We are aiming at adding Qt Creator to the binary packages. The Berlin team will focus on making sure Qt Creator will work as smoothly as possible together with Qt 5.

• Packaging

  Finally, we need to pull all the pieces together into a decent set of packages. What we have seen from the beta is that one can easily underestimate that part of the work, so we will need to have some extra focus in this area.

I would like to aim for a second beta as soon as possible, but only once most of the issues mentioned above are resolved. A realistic time frame for this second beta release is probably in around 4-6 weeks from now. After that we will quickly push for a release candidate and a Qt 5.0 final release.

Longer term

As soon as the team has moved to Digia, and we start having some time again in parallel to finishing Qt 5, we plan to focusing also on new things. Digia has already publicly communicated some areas they consider important, such as an Android and iOS support. In addition, the teams in Berlin and Oslo have been coming up with many good ideas.

We are now in the process of sorting through these ideas and prioritizing them. Our goal is to be as open and transparent as we can be about what we will be doing, as well as what we’re not going to do. In this way, we aim to avoid duplicating work and give everybody the chance to participate in the Qt Project.