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What's New in Qt 4.5

Qt 4.5 provides many improvements and enhancements over the previous releases in the Qt 4 series. This documents covers the most important features in this release, separated by category.

A comprehensive list of changes between Qt 4.4 and Qt 4.5 is included in the changes-4.5.0 file available online. A list of known issues for this release are also available.

A list of other Qt 4 features can be found on the What's New in Qt 4 page.

Highlights

Qt WebKit Integration

The WebKit browser engine included with Qt has been upgraded to the latest upstream (trunk) version of WebKit, bringing the latest features and improvements to Qt applications. These include:

Standards compatibility improvements include provision for the Netscape plugin API, allowing most Netscape plugins to be used in-process, support for HTML 5 audio and video elements using Qt's Phonon integration, and facilities for client-side storage of Web content.

Performance Improvements

The introduction of the QtBenchLib performance benchmarking library enables performance benchmarking and regression testing. Core parts of Qt itself have undergone focused re-engineering for improved graphics performance, including paint engine and text rendering improvements, Graphics View and style sheet performance improvements.

The X11 paint engine now uses XSHM (the X shared memory extension), resulting in reduced overhead for painting operations.

A new OpenGL ES 2.0-based paint engine complements the existing OpenGL paint engine, but with a focus on embedded devices.

Qt now features a pluggable graphics system, making it possible for users and developers to select raster, OpenGL or native graphics systems to take into account the specific needs of their applications and get the best performance out of them.

Mac OS X Cocoa Support

Qt for Mac OS X has been substantially rewritten to use Apple's Cocoa API, enabling Qt applications to be deployed on 64-bit Macintosh hardware. In addition, the new QMacCocoaViewContainer and QMacNativeWidget classes enable integration with Cocoa's own features and controls.

Simple recompile of Qt apps to support 64-bit (instead of a rewrite when based on Carbon) Few or no changes required to code to support 64-bit Developers can use Qt to target all Mac platforms

Windows CE Feature Parity

Qt for Windows CE has been updated to bring features of Qt 4.4 and Qt 4.5 to the Windows CE platform, including:

Support on all Windows CE platforms; recommended for WinCE 6 and up

The inclusion of these features enables developers to easily integrate Web and multimedia content into Qt applications on Windows CE Standard Edition while retaining full cross-platform compatibility with other Qt platforms.

XML Transformations with XSLT

The QtXmlPatterns module has been extended to cover XSLT, a transformation language for XML documents. A common application of this is the transformation of XML data into human-readable formats for reporting purposes.

Simple to reformat XML content without changing data structure Removes need for intermediate DOM layer for presentation Faster time to market with XML data e.g. reports as HTML or PDF

Qt Script Debugger

Developers using Qt Script in their applications can take advantage of the new Qt Script Debugger to provide error reporting for scripts, and to let users track down bugs in their own scripts.

Many standard features of GUI debugging tools are present, allowing the developer to step through running script code, inspect variables, automatically catch exceptions, and set conditional breakpoints.

OpenDocument File Format Support

Qt 4.5 includes support for writing rich text documents as OpenDocument files via the newly-introduced QTextDocumentWriter class. This provides an generic mechanism for file export that can be used to introduce support for additional formats in future releases.

Improved Network Proxy Support

Improved proxy support

Integration with system proxy settings and ability to handle non-trivial proxy cases

Qt Designer Improvements

Qt Designer 4.5 boasts some improvements on usability, for example:

In addition, Qt Designer now features an Embedded Design tab that can be found in the Preferences dialog. Within this tab, you can define embedded device profiles. These profiles contains screen settings, e.g., display resolution, default font and default style. Qt Designer will use these settings when you edit forms.

Improved GTK integration

Qt Linguist Improvements


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Qt 4.5.0-beta1