Qt: is it worth trying as a mobile platform?
May 27, 2010
There are new names on the market that have already changed the look and feel of modern devices. However, there are still old monsters that have a considerable part of the market share. What are they doing in such fast growing environment? It's not a secret that Nokia is still one of the major player's on a mobile market, so it's clever to keep an eye on their decisions, especially taking into account that they are now considering Qt as a mobile development platform for modern devices.
Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework. Using Qt, you can write web-enabled applications once and deploy them across desktop, mobile and embedded operating systems without rewriting the source code. Does it make sense to consider Qt mobile applications as a competitor in today’s applications market? Let's look at the facts:
- Qt has a long history and it was always a good choice of a GUI toolkit, especially if you're looking for a cross-platform solution.
- Nokia bought Trolltech (an original Qt maker), so now they have defined the future of the platform accordingly to their requirements.
- Recently Qt received support for LGPL license, which assumes free usage for commercial development. That makes it extremely popular.
- Nokia did a great job to extend Qt support for the new platforms including Mac OS X, as well as mobile platforms: S60 and Maemo. Also vendors, like Samsung use S60 as its platform of choice for mobile devices.
So, choosing a Qt platform gets you a feature rich and cross-platform development and deployment environment. Of course, there are some limitations, but in general, without minimal additional efforts, you are able to build an application for multiple platforms (both desktop and mobile). This has great benefits for modern solutions that are available from anywhere: your office workstations, laptops and mobile devices.
Another great item is that Nokia continues to contribute to mobile development environments. Watch for their new (Qt 4.7) that has many features like: declarative UI design, great high level support for multiple networks and much more.
