…just another hippy blog

Trolltech recently released the second (out of three planned) technology preview of the Qt bindings for Java: Qt Jambi.
This should be some good news for the many Java developers out there… a big mass to which I will always refuse to belong The project currently seems more an experiment as a real commercial product. Trolltech itself still does not know when (and if at all) the final product will be released.
As to my precious opinion (sure, laugh!!) I bet they will release it pretty soon. And with lots of bugs, at least until version x.1.

Qt Jambi is a really interesting product. There are lots of Java developers and applications. Java is great under lots of circumnstances (well, this is what it’s fans say.. I do not really agree) but I am sure there are many applications that would take a lot of advantage from integrating with the Qt toolkit. If you want a reason: did you ever write a GUI using SUN’s SWING/AWT. A nightmare! Or even worse! If there is something I hate in software development (and there sure are many things).. well, it’s writing a GUI in Java.

Qt Jambi allows to write GUIs using the Qt classes and thus the platform’s native look and feel. This may seem as a secodary feature to you, but it is really important if it comes to usability.
Jambi also maps Qt’s data types to Java’s native types and allows to mix Java and C++ code. Some interesting info can be found here: http://doc.trolltech.com/qtjambi-1.0/com/trolltech/qt/qtjambi-using-qt-documentation.html.

I didn’t have the pleasure to test Jambi as I really do not want to struggle with Java again! The technology preview is binary-only, but it comes with a nice Eclipse integration plugin and some demos and examples. The final release should be available with an OpenSource license too. I suppose they will use the usual dual licence (GPLv2 for OpenSource development and commercial license for commercial application development) for the final release.

Here are some interesting links:

From the QtDevBlog:
http://blogs.qtdeveloper.net/archives/2006/07/28/qt-jambi-preview-released/
http://blogs.qtdeveloper.net/archives/2006/08/31/second-qt-jambi-technology-preview/

Trolltech’s reference docs:
http://doc.trolltech.com/qtjambi-1.0/qtjambi-index.html