Nokia has released a developer preview of the open-source Qt development toolkit for S60, the company's Symbian-based mobile platform. This early prerelease will allow developers to start porting their Qt applications and will also help Nokia get feedback from third-party developers who are conducting real-world testing
Trolltech, the company that originally created the Qt toolkit, was acquired by Nokia earlier this year. Nokia aims to position Qt as a universal programming framework that can be used to bridge the gap between desktop and mobile software development and bring mobile applications to a wide range of devices using a single code base.
Qt supports Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X on the desktop and is also used on several mobile platforms, including the OpenMoko ASU stack, and Nokia's Maemo platform, which is used on Nokia Internet Tablet devices. Qt 4.4, which was released in May, introduced support for Windows CE and Windows Mobile. Following the acquisition of Trolltech, Nokia indicated that it would continue expanding the portability of Qt and that the toolkit would eventually extend its reach to S60. The preview released today, which reflects a pretty significant achievement despite being under development for only six months, is a sure sign that Nokia takes the S60 port very seriously.
Nokia acquired Symbian earlier this year with the intention of opening the platform and pushing it into the future. Despite its current strength in the market, Symbian growth is slowing, and the operating system is declining in relevance in the face of transitional challenges and heightened competition from the likes of Apple, Google, and others. It's an aging platform that needs more robust development tools and a broader third-party software ecosystem in order to stay on top. Qt will help infuse some new life into Symbian and could make the platform more appealing by simplifying development and providing developers with useful features such as Qt's rich graphics canvas.
The parts of Qt that are currently included in the S60 preview are the library core, the widget and drawing classes, the networking components, and the unit testing framework. It supports S60 version 3.1 and higher. The source code and binaries are available for download from the Qt web site. Nokia has also released several demos as binaries including a CoverFlow-like launcher that shows off Qt's drawing capabilities.
Qt developer Espen Riskedal provided some additional details and commentary in a blog entry this morning that was published in the official Qt blog. He expresses enthusiasm for the large number of devices that S60 compatibility will bring to the toolkit, but also warns that this preview release is still a work in progress and isn't production quality yet.
"We're porting Qt to yet another platform: S60, which roughly gives us around 80 million new devices Qt can run on. Our vision of Qt Everywhere is becoming more and more of a reality. And it feels good," he wrote. "Our policy here in Qt Software is: release often, release early. We want feedback from developers trying out our software. Now keep in mind, this first release is a technology preview. It is not supported, it is not complete, it is not production quality—basically it's for you to play with."
We have gotten a lot of really exciting Qt announcements from Nokia in recent months and, as all the pieces are falling into place, the big picture is starting to look really impressive. Last month, Nokia launched Qt Extended, a cohesive Qt mobile platform that provides a complete middleware stack for Linux-based mobile devices. Nokia can now offer hardware makers a choice between Linux and Symbian platform stacks with a shared application ecosystem. This is a hugely compelling solution to the growing portability problems that have emerged as a result of platform fragmentation in the open-source mobile space.
No comments:
Post a Comment