QCom is gone. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 12:14:16 +0200 From: info@trolltech.com To: qt-interest@trolltech.com Subject: Qt 3.0.0 Beta6 released This is the sixth beta version of Qt 3.0. This new generation of the Qt application development framework contains many new features, improvements and extensions. It also includes a significantly improved Qt Designer, and introduces Qt Linguist, Qt Assistant and a new multi-platform build tool, 'qmake'. It is highly unlikely that the Qt API will undergo any significant changes before the final release, so we encourage you to begin using Qt 3.0 right away. Detailed information about the modifications and new features for Qt 3.0 is included in the Online Reference Documentation. For a brief overview, see http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/30pre.html One significant change in this beta is the removal of QCom (Qt's component model) from the public API. Previous Qt 3.0 betas introduced a module called QCom that provides a COM-like component system. The feedback we received on this module during the 3.0 beta phase has been mixed. Many users think this module lacks the intuitiveness and compactness that they have learned to expect from a Qt API. Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to withdraw the QCom API from the Qt 3.0 release. We will continue to develop this API until it is evolved enough for our customers, and will include the improved version in a later release. We apologize for any inconvenience the QCom API change has caused. This decision was made as part of our ongoing efforts to maintain the soundness and quality of Qt. Please note that the new plugin functionality in 3.0 will still be provided. This includes using custom widgets in Qt Designer, as well as runtime addition of styles, codecs, SQL drivers, and image format handlers. This functionality is now available through a substantially simplified API. Also also note that it will still be convenient to add custom plugin capabilities to Qt 3.0 applications, since the new QLibrary class will still be available. This class takes care of the low-level, platform-dependent issues regarding loading of DLLs and obtaining pointers to the functions exported by the DLLs. Because of our recently increased development team, we have been able to realize far more of your requests in this release. Qt 3.0 is a great step towards realizing our vision of an ideal cross-platform development tool. The Qt version 3.x series is not binary compatible with the 2.x series. This means programs compiled with Qt version 2.x must be recompiled to work with Qt 3.0. Qt 3.0 will be mostly, but not completely, source compatible with the Qt 2.x series. See the document "Porting from Qt 2.x to Qt 3.0" in the Online Reference Documentation for information on how to port an existing Qt 2.x-based program to Qt 3.0. Disclaimer: the guide is not entirely complete, so it is possible that you'll discover issues that are not yet covered in the documentation. Because of the many improvements and extensions and the few parts of the API which are still being finalized, we expect this beta period to last longer than what you are typically used to from Trolltech. Unlike previous Qt releases where most of the beta testing was done with snapshot releases, this beta is not yet a final release candidate. The most visible change for long term Qt users is the reworked build system. On MS-Windows, unpack the package and start installer.exe; on Unix, unpack the package and run ./configure. Compiling and installing Qt uses a new utility 'qmake' which we recommend for writing Qt­based applications. 'qmake' is the successor of our free software add-on 'tmake', and is written using Qt rather than Perl. 'qmake' is fully compatible with 'tmake'. To improve maintainaibility between different platforms, all specific platform #defines and #includes have been moved out of the Qt sources into a platform specific qplatformdefs.h file. The files are located in qt/mkspec/-/qplatformdefs.h. For this beta release, the following platforms have been tested: win32-borland win32-msvc irix-o32 irix-n32 irix-g++ tru64-cxx tru64-g++ solaris-cc solaris-g++ linux-g++ linux-kcc freebsd-g++ unixware7-g++ unixware7-cc aix-g++ aix-xlc hpux-acc hpux-g++ If you test the beta on an an unsupported version of Unix, please contact us that we can assist you. How to get the beta release: Qt Free Edition: Download the .tar.gz archive from ftp.trolltech.com. To get better download times, use ftpsearch and search for qt-x11-free-3.0.0-beta6.tar.gz to find it on a mirror ftp site near you. Qt Professional Edition, Qt Enterprise Edition: Holders of valid licenses should have received an e-mail with instructions on how to get the beta. Contact sales@trolltech.com if you are a Professional or Enterprise Edition licensee and have not received this e-mail. Any problems encountered with the beta version should be reported to qt-bugs@trolltech.com, or to the snapshot-users mailing list. Qt is a trademark of Trolltech AS. -- The Trolls -- List archive and information: http://qt-interest.trolltech.com