Starting next weekend, one of the most significant events on the Qt development and contribution calendar is taking place in Bilbao, Spain. The co-located and parallel-running Qt Contributor Summit and Akademy promise to push plans for Qt forward during the coming year. As an unconference, the format of the Qt Contributor Summit is designed to […]

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about the internals of the QML engine. In today's post, we'll examine the concept of custom parsers in QML. Recap In the first blog post of the series, we covered how the QML engine loads QML files. One important concept was that every element in the […]

With QML as abstraction layer, we nowadays have a great way to separate the business logic (C++) of our application from the graphical user interface (QtQuick/QtWidgets/Cascades) on top of it. The interface between the two layers is well defined by the meta-object API, which essentially boils down to signals and slots for notifications and invocations, […]

This article concludes our series on what is new in Qt 5.1 with respect to OpenGL. Earlier articles in this series are available at: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 More shader stages In Qt 5.0 the QOpenGLShader and QOpenGLShaderProgram classes only had support for Vertex and Fragment shaders. Qt 5.1 will include […]

(NOTE: this blog post has been edited many times since its original publication) You've heard of valgrind before, its default tool (memcheck) is such a life saver, being able to detect memory-related bugs in your code (leaks, double deletions, use of deleted memory, use of uninitialized memory, etc.). Well, it turns out that valgrind also […]

This article continues our series on what is new in Qt 5.1 with respect to OpenGL. Earlier articles in this series are available at: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 OpenGL Debug Output The traditional way to debug OpenGL is to call glGetError() after every GL function call. This is tedious, clutters up our code, […]

This article continues our series on what is new in Qt 5.1 with respect to OpenGL. If you haven't already seen them, you may be interested in reading Part 1 and Part 2. Timer Queries OpenGL on the desktop exposes a very useful tool in the shape of timer query objects. These can be used […]

This article continues our series on what is new in Qt 5.1 with respect to OpenGL. The first installment can be found here. Vertex Array Objects Qt has QOpenGLBuffer (and before that QGLBuffer) to help manage various types of OpenGL buffer objects such as per-vertex attribute data and element index buffers. OpenGL also has a […]

This blog is the first in a series that will show how to use OpenGL with Qt 5. In this article, we shall take a very quick look at Qt's historical support for OpenGL and then go on to describe the first batch of new features coming in Qt 5.1 that will enhance Qt's OpenGL […]

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about the internals of the QML engine. In the last blog post, we covered how bindings in the QML engine work. In this post, we'll examine the different kind of bindings. Some of this content is already covered by my DevDays talk QtQuick Under the Hood. […]

Today I want to talk about the usage of data models in Cascades. As you might know already, Cascades provides the abstract interface bb::cascades::DataModel, which is used by bb::cascades::ListView to retrieve and display arbitrary data. Cascades also provides a couple of convenience classes that implement this DataModel interface, namely ArrayDataModel GroupDataModel QListDataModel XmlDataModel While the […]

Today I'd like to talk a bit about a basic concept of software design: layers. When you design your application (or framework), you should try to define layers of concerns, like storage, business logic and UI. That's no rocket science and is taught at schools and universities for a couple for years now already. However, […]

KDAB is now offering three-day training courses on C++11, the new C++ version that was introduced in 2011. C++11 will become more and more important in the C++ ecosystem, eventually becoming the most prevalent version. Every professional developer should invest in learning the new language version and try introducing its benefits into projects. And for […]

Continuing the series on KDAB contributions to Qt 5.0 (part 4), this time we cover community involvement, work on the Qt installer, QPointer and QWeakPointer modernization, and various macros. Community involement KDAB has been contributing to Qt since before the launch of Open Governance. With the launch of the Qt Project, everything changed regarding how […]

Continuing the series on KDAB contributions to Qt 5.0 (part 1, part 2, part 3), this time we cover C++11, and various optimizations. C++11 support There have been many people and companies working on C++11 support in Qt 5. KDAB was involved in several Qt 5 features which relate to C++11. An overview of the […]

Continuing the series on KDAB contributions to Qt 5.0 (part 1, part 2), this time we cover itemmmodels, effective C++ and janitorial work. Itemmodels Improvements As KDAB took on the role of Itemviews Maintainer in Qt 5, naturally we were the primary contributor and reviewer of all itemmodels and itemviews patches. Several relevant changes have […]

Continuing the series on KDAB contributions to Qt 5.0, this time we cover some platform support and containers. Containers improvements The containers in Qt 5 recieved many improvements compared to their Qt 4 versions. Due to concerns of binary compatibility, such changes can only be undertaken for new major releases of Qt, but still there […]

Yesterday Qt 5.0.0 was released. It is the culmination of huge amounts of work since the announcement of and start of Qt 5's development. This is the first major release of Qt since the launch of open governance in Autumn 2011, when it became much easier for external individuals and companies to contribute to Qt […]

This blog post is part of an ongoing series about the internals of the QML engine. In the last blog post, we covered how the QML engine loads QML files. To recap, QML files are parsed and then C++ objects are created for all elements in the QML file. For example, we saw that when […]

It was announced this morning that Digia Plc will acquire the "Qt software technologies and Qt business" from Nokia. This ends the recent uncertainty in the Qt community, something that should be beneficial for the Qt ecosystem and the Qt users worldwide, including KDAB's customers, and hopefully ensures the continuity and sustained funding of Qt […]