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TQt 3.0 adds a lot of new features and improvements over the TQt 2.x series. Some internals have undergone major redesign and new classes and methods have been added.
We have tried to keep the API of TQt 3.0 as compatible as possible with the TQt 2.x series. For most applications only minor changes will be needed to compile and run them successfully using TQt 3.0.
One of the major new features that has been added in the 3.0 release is a module allowing you to easily work with databases. The API is platform independent and database neutral. This module is seamlessly integrated into TQt Designer, greatly simplifying the process of building database applications and using data aware widgets.
Other major new features include a plugin architecture. You can use your own and third party plugins your own applications. The Unicode support of TQt 2.x has been greatly enhanced, it now includes full support for scripts written from right to left (e.g. Arabic and Hebrew) and also provides improved support for Asian languages.
Many new classes have been added to the TQt Library. Amongst them are classes that provide a docking architecture (TQDockArea/TQDockWindow), a powerful rich text editor (TQTextEdit), a class to store and access application settings (TQSettings) and a class to create and communicate with processes (TQProcess).
Apart from the changes in the library itself a lot has been done to make the development of TQt applications with TQt 3.0 even easier than before. Two new applications have been added: TQt Linguist is a tool to help you translate your application into different languages; TQt Assistant is an easy to use help browser for the TQt documentation that supports bookmarks and can search by keyword.
Another change concerns the TQt build system, which has been reworked to make it a lot easier to port TQt to new platforms. You can use this platform independent build system for your own applications.
A large number of new features has been added to TQt 3.0. The following list gives an overview of the most important new and changed aspects of the TQt library. A full list of every new method follows the overview.
One of the major new features in TQt 3.0 is the SQL module that provides multiplatform access to SQL databases, making database application programming with TQt seamless and portable. The API, built with standard SQL, is database-neutral and software development is independent of the underlying database.
A collection of tightly focused C++ classes are provided to give the programmer direct access to SQL databases. Developers can send raw SQL to the database server or have the TQt SQL classes generate SQL queries automatically. Drivers for Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and ODBC are available and writing new drivers is straightforward.
Tying the results of SQL queries to GUI components is fully supported by TQt's SQL widgets. These classes include a tabular data widget (for spreadsheet-like data presentation with in-place editing), a form-based data browser (which provides data navigation and edit functions) and a form-based data viewer (which provides read-only forms). This framework can be extended by using custom field editors, allowing for example, a data table to use custom widgets for in-place editing. The SQL module fully supports TQt's signal/slots mechanism, making it easy for developers to include their own data validation and auditing code.
TQt Designer fully supports TQt's SQL module. All SQL widgets can be laid out within TQt Designer, and relationships can be established between controls visually. Many interactions can be defined purely in terms of TQt's signals/slots mechanism directly in TQt Designer.
The TQLibrary class provides a platform independent wrapper for runtime loading of shared libraries. TQPluginManager makes it trivial to implement plugin support in applications. The TQt library is able to load additional styles, database drivers and text codecs from plugins.
TQt Designer supports custom widgets in plugins, and will use the widgets both when designing and previewing forms.
See the plugins documentation.
The rich text engine originally introduced in TQt 2.0 has been further optimized and extended to support editing. It allows editing formatted text with different fonts, colors, paragraph styles, tables and images. The editor supports different word wrap modes, command-based undo/redo, multiple selections, drag and drop, and many other features. The new TQTextEdit engine is highly optimized for proccesing and displaying large documents tquickly and efficiently.
Apart from the rich text engine, another new feature of TQt 3.0 that relates to text handling is the greatly improved Unicode support. TQt 3.0 includes an implementation of the bidirectional algorithm (BiDi) as defined in the Unicode standard and a shaping engine for Arabic, which gives full native language support to Arabic and Hebrew speaking people. At the same time the support for Asian languages has been greatly enhanced.
The support is almost transparent for the developer using TQt to develop their applications. This means that developers who developed applications using TQt 2.x will automatically gain the full support for these languages when switching to TQt 3.0. Developers can rely on their application to work for people using writing systems different from Latin1, without having to worry about the complexities involved with these scripts, as TQt takes care of this automatically.
TQt 3.0 introduces the concept of Dock Windows and Dock Areas. Dock windows are widgets, that can be attached to, and detached from, dock areas. The commonest kind of dock window is a tool bar. Any number of dock windows may be placed in a dock area. A main window can have dock areas, for example, TQMainWindow provides four dock areas (top, left, bottom, right) by default. The user can freely move dock windows and place them at a convenient place in a dock area, or drag them out of the application and have them float freely as top level windows in their own right. Dock windows can also be minimized or hidden.
For developers, dock windows behave just like ordinary widgets. TQToolbar for example is now a specialized subclass of a dock window. The API of TQMainWindow and TQToolBar is source compatible with TQt 2.x, so existing code which uses these classes will continue to work.
TQt has always provided regular expression support, but that support was pretty much limited to what was retquired in common GUI control elements such as file dialogs. TQt 3.0 introduces a new regular expression engine, TQRegExp, that supports most of Perl's regex features and is Unicode based. The most useful additions are support for parentheses (capturing and non-capturing) and backreferences.
Most programs will need to store some settings between runs, for example, user selected fonts, colors and other preferences, or a list of recently used files. The new TQSettings class provides a platform independent way to achieve this goal. The API makes it easy to store and retrieve most of the basic data types used in TQt (such as basic C++ types, strings, lists, colors, etc). The class uses the registry on the Windows platform and traditional resource files on Unix.
TQProcess is a class that allows you to start other programs from within a TQt application in a platform independent manner. It gives you full control over the started program, for example you can redirect the input and output of console applications.
Accessibility means making software usable and accessible to a wide range of users, including those with disabilities. In TQt 3.0, most widgets provide accessibility information for assistive tools that can be used by a wide range of disabled users. TQt standard widgets like buttons or range controls are fully supported. Support for complex widgets, like e.g. TQListView, is in development. Existing applications that make use of standard widgets will become accessible just by using TQt 3.0.
TQt uses the Active Accessibility infrastructure on Windows, and needs the MSAA SDK, which is part of most platform SDKs. With improving standardization of accessibility on other platforms, TQt will support assistive technologies on other systems, too.
The XML framework introduced in TQt 2.2 has been vastly improved. TQt 2.2 already supported level 1 of the Document Object Model (DOM), a W3C standard for accessing and modifying XML documents. TQt 3.0 has added support for DOM Level 2 and XML namespaces.
The XML parser has been extended to allow incremental parsing of XML documents. This allows you to start parsing the document directly after the first parts of the data have arrived, and to continue whenever new data is available. This is especially useful if the XML document is read from a slow source, e.g. over the network, as it allows the application to start working on the data at a very early stage.
SVG is a W3C standard for "Scalable Vector Graphics". TQt 3.0's XML support means that TQPicture can optionally generate and import static SVG documents. All the SVG features that have an equivalent in TQPainter are supported.
Many professional applications, such as DTP and CAD software, are able to display data on two or more monitors. In TQt 3.0 the TQDesktopWidget class provides the application with runtime information about the number and geometry of the desktops on the different monitors and such allows applications to efficiently use a multi-monitor setup.
The virtual desktop of Mac OS X, Windows 98, and 2000 is supported, as well as the traditional multi-screen and the newer Xinerama multihead setups on X11.
TQt 3.0 now complies with the NET WM Specification, recently adopted by KDE 2.0. This allows easy integration and proper execution with desktop environments that support the NET WM specification.
The font handling on X11 has undergone major changes. TQFont no longer has a one-to-one relation with window system fonts. TQFont is now a logical font that can load multiple window system fonts to simplify Unicode text display. This completely removes the burden of changing/setting fonts for a specific locale/language from the programmer. For end-users, any font can be used in any locale. For example, a user in Norway will be able to see Korean text without having to set their locale to Korean.
TQt 3.0 also supports the new render extension recently added to XFree86. This adds support for anti aliased text and pixmaps with alpha channel (semi transparency) on the systems that support the rendering extension (at the moment XFree 4.0.3 and later).
Printing support has been enhanced on all platforms. The TQPrinter class now supports setting a virtual resolution for the painting process. This makes WYSIWYG printing trivial, and also allows you to take full advantage of the high resolution of a printer when painting on it.
The postscript driver built into TQt and used on Unix has been greatly enhanced. It supports the embedding of true/open type and type1 fonts into the document, and can correctly handle and display Unicode. Support for fonts built into the printer has been enhanced and TQt now knows about the most common printer fonts used for Asian languages.
This class provides a simple interface for HTTP downloads and uploads.
Support for the C++ Standard Template Library has been added to the TQt Template Library (TQTL). The TQTL classes now contain appropriate copy constructors and typedefs so that they can be freely mixed with other STL containers and algorithms. In addition, new member functions have been added to TQTL template classes which correspond to STL-style naming conventions (e.g., push_back()).
TQt Designer was a pure dialog editor in TQt 2.2 but has now been extended to provide the full functionality of a GUI design tool.
This includes the ability to lay out main windows with menus and toolbars. Actions can be edited within TQt Designer and then plugged into toolbars and menu bars via drag and drop. Splitters can now be used in a way similar to layouts to group widgets horizontally or vertically.
In TQt 2.2, many of the dialogs created by TQt Designer had to be subclassed to implement functionality beyond the predefined signal and slot connections. Whilst the subclassing approach is still fully supported, TQt Designer now offers an alternative: a plugin for editing slots. The editor offers features such as syntax highlighting, completion, parentheses matching and incremental search.
The functionality of TQt Designer can now be extended via plugins. Using TQt Designer's interface or by implementing one of the provided interfaces in a plugin, a two way communication between plugin and TQt Designer can be established. This functionality is used to implement plugins for custom widgets, so that they can be used as real widgets inside the designer.
Basic support for project management has been added. This allows you to read and edit *.pro files, add and remove files to/from the project and do some global operations on the project. You can now open the project file and have one-click access to all the *.ui forms in the project.
In addition to generating code via uic, TQt Designer now supports the dynamic creation of widgets directly from XML user interface description files (*.ui files) at runtime. This eliminates the need of recompiling your application when the GUI changes, and could be used to enable your customers to do their own customizations. Technically, the feature is provided by a new class, TQWidgetFactory in the TQResource library.
TQt Linguist is a GUI utility to support translating the user-visible text in applications written with TQt. It comes with two command-line tools: lupdate and lrelease.
Translation of a TQt application is a three-step process:
TQt Linguist is a tool suitable for use by translators. Each user-visible (source) text is characterized by the text itself, a context (usually the name of the C++ class containing the text), and an optional comment to help the translator. The C++ class name will usually be the name of the relevant dialog, and the comment will often contain instructions that describe how to navigate to the relevant dialog.
You can create phrase books for TQt Linguist to provide common translations to help ensure consistency and to speed up the translation process. Whenever a translator navigates to a new text to translate, TQt Linguist uses an intelligent algorithm to provide a list of possible translations: the list is composed of relevant text from any open phrase books and also from identical or similar text that has already been translated.
Once a translation is complete it can be marked as "done"; such translations are included in the *.qm file. Text that has not been "done" is included in the *.qm file in its original form. Although TQt Linguist is a GUI application with dock windows and mouse control, toolbars, etc., it has a full set of keyboard shortcuts to make translation as fast and efficient as possible.
When the TQt application that you're developing evolves (e.g. from version 1.0 to version 1.1), the utility lupdate merges the source texts from the new version with the previous translation source file, reusing existing translations. In some typical cases, lupdate may suggest translations. These translations are marked as unfinished, so you can easily find and check them.
Thanks to the positive feedback we received about the help system built into TQt Designer, we decided to offer this part as a separate application called TQt Assistant. TQt Assistant can be used to browse the TQt class documentation as well as the manuals for TQt Designer and TQt Linguist. It offers index searching, a contents overview, bookmarks history and incremental search. TQt Assistant is used by both TQt Designer and TQt Linguist for browsing their help documentation.
To ease portability we now provide the qmake utility to replace tmake. TQMake is a C++ version of tmake which offers additional functionallity that is difficult to reproduce in tmake. Trolltech uses qmake in its build system for TQt and related products and we have released it as free software.
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