Qt 4.5 Released, Qt Extended Discontinued

The Norwegians at Qt Software (formerly known as Trolltech, which was bought out by Nokia) have released version 4.5 of the Qt Toolkit. This major update brings performance improvements, the introduction of the Qt Creator program, an improved WebKit rendering engine, Netscape plug-in API support, a new Javascript engine, and a horde of other improvements.

Qt Creator 1.0 was released in conjunction with Qt 4.5 and it brings forth a lightweight cross-platform IDE for Qt development with a C++ focus. Qt Creator has an integrated visual debugger, source code management, and other features.

While all of these features for Qt 4.5 are splendid, one of the most significant attributes about this release is that Qt is now LGPL licensed so you can use Qt in your proprietary applications without having to attain Nokia's paid license.

The release announcement for Qt 4.5 can be found at Qt Software. The company has also announced that Qt Extended has been discontinued. This news comes just about two weeks after they announced they would be stopping work on Qt Jambi. The final release of Qt Extended will come on Thursday, while in the future some parts of Qt Extended will be moved into the mainline Qt toolkit.