Qt is a mature and powerful framework for delivering sophisticated applications across a multitude of platforms. It is widely used in embedded devices including TVs, satellite set-top boxes, medical equipment, car dashboards, and much more. It also has a rich history in the Linux world, with KDE and Sailfish OS using it extensively and many apps in the stores being developed using Qt. It has also made great strides in the Mobile arena over the past several years. However, in the Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X worlds, the dominance of C#/.NET and Objective-C/Cocoa mean that Qt is often overlooked.
This book aims to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the Qt framework and show how you can write your application once and deploy it to multiple operating system desktops. We will build a complete real-world line of business (LOB) solution from scratch, with distinct library, user interface, and unit test projects.
We will cover building a modern, responsive user interface with QML and wiring it up to rich C++ classes. We will control every aspect of our project configuration and output with QMake, including platform detection and conditional expressions. We will build “self-aware” data entities that can serialize themselves to and from JSON. We will persist those data entities in a database and learn how to find and update them. We will reach out to the internet and consume an RSS feed. Finally, we will produce an installation package so that we can deploy our application onto other machines.
In this chapter, we will install and configure the Qt framework and associated Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Qt Creator. We will create a simple scratchpad application that we will use throughout the remainder of the book to demonstrate various techniques. We will cover the following topics:
- Installing Qt
- Maintaining your installation
- Qt Creator
- Scratchpad project
- qmake
