Advanced Qt Programming

Book excerpt: Master Qt’s Most Powerful APIs, Patterns, and Development Practices Qt has evolved into a remarkably powerful solution for cross-platform desktop, Web, and mobile development. However, even the most experienced Qt programmers only use a fraction of its capabilities. Moreover, practical information about Qt’s newest features has been scarce—until now. Advanced Qt Programming shows developers exactly how to take full advantage of Qt 4.5’s and Qt 4.6’s most valuable new APIs, application patterns, and development practices. Authored by Qt expert Mark Summerfield, this book concentrates on techniques that offer the most power and flexibility with the least added complexity. Summerfield focuses especially on model/view and graphics/view programming, hybrid desktop/Web applications, threading, and applications incorporating media and rich text. Throughout, he presents realistic, downloadable code examples, all tested on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux using Qt 4.6 (and most tested on Qt 4.5) and designed to anticipate future versions of Qt. The book Walks through using Qt with WebKit to create innovative hybrid desktop/Internet applications Shows how to use the Phonon framework to build powerful multimedia applications Presents state-of-the-art techniques for using model/view table and tree models, QStandardItemModels, delegates, and views, and for creating custom table and tree models, delegates, and views Explains how to write more effective threaded programs with the QtConcurrent module and with the QThread class Includes detailed coverage of creating rich text editors and documents Thoroughly covers graphics/view programming: architecture, windows, widgets, layouts, scenes, and more Introduces Qt 4.6’s powerful animation and state machine frameworks