Qt 5.0 Beta 2 is Out

I’m glad to announce that Qt 5.0 Beta 2 is now released, just in time for Qt Developer Days in Berlin. The beta puts us closer to the final release of Qt 5.0, which we anticipate to release by the end of the year.

A Full Release – Qt 5.0 Throughout

A lot of work has happened since the Beta 1 towards bringing Qt 5 closer to a final release. One of the biggest differences is that this Qt 5.0 release includes not only the Qt libraries, but also the tools. Qt Creator 2.6 based on Qt 5.0 is now bundled together with Qt 5.0 to make it a full complete release. It also helps us in testing and verifying the quality of Qt 5.

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.

In addition, it shows that Qt 5 is a good and mature release with a very high degree of compatibility with Qt 4.x. Qt Creator can currently be built both against Qt 4.8 and 5.0 from a single code base. This proves that Qt 5.0 is almost fully source-compatible with Qt 4.8.

Qt 5.0 Functionality

With Qt 5.0 Beta 2, we have now finalized the list of modules and packages that will be part of the 5.0 final release. Qt 5.0 will contain the following libraries:

Qt Essentials

• Qt Core
• Qt Network
• Qt Gui
• Qt Sql
• Qt Testlib
• Qt Widgets
• Qt Qml
• Qt Quick
• Qt Multimedia
• Qt WebKit
• Qt WebKit Widgets

Qt Add-ons

• Qt Xml
• Qt XmlPatterns
• Qt Svg
• Qt Concurrent
• Qt Printsupport
• Qt DBus
• Qt OpenGL
• Qt ActiveQt
• Qt Graphical Effects
• Qt Script
• Qt Declarative
• Qt Image Formats

Tools and other functionality

• Qt Assistant
• Qt Linguist
• Qt Designer
• Qt Translations
• Qt Creator
• Qt Documentation

As you can see, there is a lot of functionality included in Qt 5.0., but some modules like Qt 3D have been excluded from this release. However, they are still available from qt-project.org and you can use them together with Qt 5.0.

Known Issues

As this is a beta, it still has some known issues. First of all, there is still a major overhaul of the documentation planned for Qt 5.0 that didn’t make it into this beta, so you can still expect some larger changes in this area. Apart from that, there’s a lot of smaller known issues. An up-to-date list can be found at http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt500beta2KnownIssues

Try it Out

Because this release bundles the libraries and the tools, it should now make it very easy for everybody to get started with Qt 5.0 and try it out on their own project. Please go ahead, try it out on your project and give us your feedback so that we can fix as many issues as possible for the final 5.0 release.

I encourage you to download Qt 5.0 Beta 2 from the http://qt-project.org/downloads site or from http://qt.digia.com/Try-Qt-Now/

If you are a Qt commercial customer, you can download the release via your Digia Qt customer portal.