Nokia releases Qt 4.7 new mobile UI framework

Nokia has announced the official release of Qt 4.7, a new version of the company's open source development toolkit. The update introduces an impressive new framework called "Qt Quick" that accelerates the development of mobile user interfaces that work across multiple platforms and form factors.

Qt is a cross-platform development toolkit created by Norwegian company Trolltech, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. Qt—which is used by mainstream commercial software vendors like Google, Adobe, Amazon, Autodesk, and Skype—offers a broad set of libraries, a comprehensive widget toolkit, and a pre-processing tool that extends the C++ programming language and object model with a number of advanced features.


Under Nokia's stewardship, Qt has gained some extremely sophisticated new features for creating mobile user interfaces. The Qt Quick framework, which is the result of those efforts, is now available for use in version 4.7. The Qt Quick stack primarily consists of a new declarative scripting language called QML that allows developers to describe flexible user interface layouts. QML can be used seamlessly with JavaScript as glue code for controlling the behavior of the user interface.

The collection of standard layout elements that are supported by default in QML greatly simplify the process of creating a finger-friendly user interface. Features like kinetic scrolling are tightly integrated, and useful effects like animated transitions are trivially easy to achieve. The QML language emphasizes a design-driven workflow and makes it easier to turn a free-form mockup into a working user interface. Qt Quick is a lot less rigid than a conventional user interface toolkit because it encourages developers to piece together their own distinctive user experiences using arbitrary graphical assets rather than discrete widgets.

It's possible to build entire applications with only QML and JavaScript, but QML is even more powerful when it is used in conjunction with C++. Qt 4.7 offers a declarative view widget that developers can use to load a QML layout inside of a conventional Qt window in a C++ application. The C++ program's underlying functions and data structures can be exposed through the declarative view and made accessible in QML, allowing developers to implement the performance-sensitive parts of their program in C++ but use QML to create a rich user interface on top.

QML is designed to take advantage of Qt's powerful model/view/controller (MVC) framework, meaning that existing Qt applications designed around Qt's MVC classes will be easy to refit with a QML user interface. This opens up a path for bringing existing Qt desktop applications to mobile devices. Developers merely have to add a few roles to their model and then expose it to a QML view, where a touchscreen-friendly interface can be created with a little bit of declarative scripting.

You can download the Qt 4.7 SDK from the Qt website.

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