…just another hippy blog

Trolltech releases the third and last technical preview of their Qt bindings for Java. Lots of work has been done since the TP2 and lots of work still needs to be done.

This version is based on Qt 4.2 and thus it can benefit from the new features in Qt 4.2 (see my previous post). Some of the major changes include support for SVG graphics (this was added to Qt 4.1), the QGraphicsView (there’s a funny demo showing some mice ;), support for JavaDoc and “real” enums.

Some words about enums: C++ and Java enums are conceptually very different. Enums are used in different ways in Qt. Some examples are the QEvent::Type extensible enumerator and the or-combinable flags in QIODevice::OpenMode. Java flags can only be used as enumerators. TP3 solves this issue allowing to use enums with Qt even if the syntax is sometimes different.

The Eclipse plugin has been updated too, and lots of bugs have been fixed. I used it for some hours without Eclipse crashing! The Qt Jambi resource system still needs to be integrated into the Qt Jambi Designer (and it’s Eclipse integration). You can add resources using the Action Editor in TP3, but the JUIC would produce wrong prefixes and the files woun’t get loaded. Trolltech developer Eskil Blomfeldt has told me that this issue will be solved in a future release and we will be able to use the resource system with the Qt Jambi Designer too.

I was reading some posts on the Trolltech Qt-Interest archive and it seems that KDevelop developers are working on a Java language parser. This means we may be able to see a Qt Jambi plugin for KDevelop in (a not so near) future. Jakob Petsovits and Italian Roberto Raggi (a former student at my own University in Pisa should be the main developers for the Java-code.