Nokia have released Qt 4.7, the cross platform C++ framework for GUI applications. The new version, which was previewed in March, incorporates QML, a mark-up language for defining user interfaces which, it is hoped, will make application developers' lives easier by moving to a declarative and scripted approach to creating windows and the components that live within them. QML is part of the Qt Quick UI Creation Kit, which includes QtDeclarative for rendering QML user interfaces and binding the components to C++ code and enhancements to Qt Creator to generate QML UIs. A new Qt SDK only contains an older version of Qt Creator, 2.0.1, with the full QML support planned for Qt Creator 2.1.

Another highlight is the inclusion of hardware accelerated compositing in QtWebKit, the web browsing component of Qt, giving 30% faster animation rendering and faster scrolling for complex pages. According to Nokia, even the component for displaying static text, QStaticText, is twice as fast as the previous version.

For full details of what's new in Qt 4.7, a "What's New in Qt 4.7" details the major changes, including the Network Bearer Management API for applications to sense how they are connected to a network and the various other new classes and members which have been added to the Qt API.

Qt is a framework written in C++ available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, which offers the same functions on all three platforms. It forms the basis for the open source KDE Linux desktop. After taking over Trolltech, the company that originally developed the framework, Nokia released the library under the LGPL and provided open access to the code repositories.

The Qt 4.7 SDK is available to download from the Nokia site for Windows, Linux (32 and 64-bit) and Mac OS X. The framework is also available stand-alone, for Windows (using minGW or VS2008), Linux, Mac OS X, embedded Linux, Windows CE and Maemo 5.

(djwm)