14 DAY TRIAL // It took the Qt developers more than two and a half months to finish the feature set of Qt 5.8, the next major release of the multiplatform and open-source software development framework for creating modern graphical user interfaces for mobile and desktop platforms.
Qt 5.8 is everything you love about Qt, but faster, more powerful, and lighter. It improves the cross-platform compatibility for Linux, Android, macOS, and Microsoft Windows, accelerating your development of beautiful products for any device, including Internet of Things (IoT). Qt 5.8 introduces a new way to configure Qt for your needs thanks to a new project codenamed Qt Lite.
"Implementing support for this put us on a longer journey, where we rewrote most parts of the system that was being used to configure Qt. The new system cleans up a system that had grown over the last 15 years, and that also lead to many inconsistencies on how Qt was being configured on different host platforms," said Lars Knoll, CTO at The Qt Company.
Qt 5.8 helps you create multi-process devices
There are many new and attractive features implemented in Qt 5.8, which many Qt developers will love, including the ability to create multi-process devices, as well as support for enabling simultaneous testing and development of projects for multiple teams. It also lets you integrate state machines into any Qt app and fully supports the Qt Wayland Compositor API for the next-generation Wayland display server.
Among other noteworthy improvements brought by Qt 5.8, we can mention that the Qt Webengine was updated to Chromium 53, the Qt QML and Qt Quick components received many under-the-hood improvements, and Qt SCXML is now fully supported. Support for multi-screen systems has been improved for embedded platforms.
A Candlestick chart type is now available for Qt Charts, Qt Gui's QOpenGLTextureBlitter API is available to everyone, there's initial support for text-to-speech functionality thanks to the implementation of the Qt Speech module, Qt Serialbus is fully supported in Qt 5.8, and full TLS PSK cyphersuites support is provided for Qt Network and Web Sockets.
Other than that, it looks like Qt 5.8 introduces BTLE Peripheral support for Apple's iOS and macOS operating systems, along with BTLE Central support on WinRT through the Qt Bluetooth module. Configurable Diffie-Hellman parameters are now supported in Qt Network, and HTTP/2 support is available in QNetworkAccessManager.
Best of all, Qt can now be compiled for Apple's watchOS and tvOS operating system, but for the moment, Qt 5.8 offers limited, non-graphical support for watchOS. Check out the official Qt website for all the juicy details about Qt 5.8's new features and the introductory video below to see them in action.
Download Qt 5.8 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
