Qt for beginners Introduction

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Qt for beginners — Introduction

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Introduction to Qt

Qt (pronunce it as "cute", but not "cu-tee") is a cross-platform framework, that is usually used as a graphical toolkit, although it is also very helpful in creating CLI applications. It runs on the three major desktop OSes, as well as on mobile OSes, such as Symbian, Nokia Belle, Meego Harmattan, MeeGo or BB10, and on embedded devices. Ports for Android (Necessitas) and iOS are also in development.

Qt has an impressive collection of modules, including

• QtCore, a base library that provides containers, thread management, event management, and much more
• QtWidgets, a GUI toolkit for Desktop, that provides a lot of graphical components to design applications.
• QtNetwork, that provides an useful set of classes to deal with network communications
• QtWebkit, the webkit engine, that enable the use of web pages and web apps in a Qt application.
• QtSQL, QtXML …

Installing Qt SDK

To get start to write Qt applications, you have to get Qt libraries, and, if you want, an IDE. They can be build from source, or better, be downloaded as an SDK from the download page.

This SDK includes a lot of features, like cross compilers for Symbian and the Nokia N9. You might choose not to install them by selecting "custom install". Be sure to keep these packages

• QMake Documentation
• Qt Documentation
• Qt 4.8.1 (Destkop), assuming that Qt 4.8.1 is the latest version.
• Qt Creator

These packages can also be useful

• Qt Examples
• Qt Linguist

You can select other packages if you want to develop for Symbian / Maemo / Meego, or with older version of Qt.

NB : On linux, it is better to use the packages that your distribution provides. Qt Creator should be available in nearly all distributions, and installing it should install all dependancies, like libraries, compilers, and developement headers.

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