Qt Publishes Roadmap, Opens Up Git Repository

Back in March we witnessed the release of Qt 4.5 which was also met by an announcement that Qt Extended was to be discontinued and that was just weeks after the announcement came down that Qt Jambi would be discontinued. There have certainly been many changes since Nokia bought out Trolltech and then renamed it to Qt Software. Nokia also allowed these Norwegian programmers to license Qt under the LGPL. Today there are more changes coming out of Qt Software.

First off, the Qt tool-kit is now being developed in a public Git repository, which can be found at Gitorious. Qt is now being openly developed to hopefully spur additional community contributions whether it be code, translations, or other work. The Qt Creator IDE, the discontinued Qt Jambi, and other Qt Software projects will now call this Git repository their home.

Qt Software has also decided to publish a road-map for their Qt plans. The public Qt road-map can be found on their developer web-site. Some of the items they are working on post-4.5 include a decorative UI, an animation API, multi-touch and gestures, JavaScript unification, 3D enablers, XML schema support, a Qt 3D portability API, and various other items.

Qt's plans for a 3D portability API sound a bit like the work Intel and others have been putting into Clutter to simplify the development of OpenGL and OpenGL ES programs. The 3D enabler action item consists of "Provide APIs to simplify creation of 3D applications with OpenGL, including math primitives for matrix multiplication, vectors, quaternicons (client-side) and an API for vertex and fragment Shaders. Future research will be done on stencils, vertex buffers and arrays, texture manipulation and geometry shaders."