Digia has announced several applications of the newly announced Qt cross-platform application and user interface (UI) development framework that are specifically targeted at creators of embedded systems. Qt is an open source framework developed and maintained by Digia and the Qt Project. It enables developers to realise applications and companies to create their own software ecosystems fast. Qt enables the creation of the type of rich graphics and smooth animations that users increasingly expect, as well as rigorous and complex applications with intuitive UIs. And, because the applications are native to their respective systems, they extract the maximum performance from the underlying hardware.
Key benefits of Qt 5 include: graphics quality; performance on constrained hardware; cross-platform portability; support for C++11; HTML5 support with QtWebKit 2; a vastly improved QML engine with new APIs; ease of use and compatibility with Qt 4 versions. Qt’s ability to deliver impressive graphics has been enhanced with the use of OpenGL ES (the version of the graphics application programming interface designed specifically for embedded systems and mobile devices). This makes it easier to develop and deploy rich graphics with velvet-like animations and transitions as well as smoothly-rendered 2D and 3D animations on high-end architectures as well as on devices with relatively limited performance, such as mobile phones, tablets and low-cost development platforms including Raspberry Pi.
Cross-platform portability is made even simpler in Qt 5 due to a new modularized code base, consisting of essentials and add-on modules, which enable the system code size to be reduced. The consolidation of the Qt Platform Abstraction layer also emphasizes cross-platform portability by enabling the ease of development for multiple-target deployment, bringing freedom to the developer.
Qt supports embedded operating systems including Embedded Linux, Windows Embedded and the most widely deployed real-time operating systems for embedded devices – Wind River VxWorks, QNX Neutrino and Green Hills Software INTEGRITY – together with all major desktop operating systems (including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) and popular mobile OSes.
For more information on the functionality of Qt 5, visit http://qt.digia.com.
