I am extremely happy to announce that Qt 5.4 Beta is now available for download. There are a lot of new and interesting things in Qt 5.4 and I will try to summarize the most important highlights in this blog post.
Powerful Web Offering with Qt WebEngine
As the importance of HTML5 has grown we want to provide the best support for HTML5 within the Qt technology offering. The Qt WebEngine, a long-term R&D project based on the Chromium web engine has now reached fully supported version on desktop and embedded platforms.
Qt WebEngine provides a convenient API for both Qt Widgets and Qt Quick for using the Chromium web engine. Besides plain web viewing purposes Qt WebEngine takes full benefit of the whole Qt graphics stack integration allowing you to mix and overlay native Qt controls with web contents and OpenGL shaders. Of course, the fact that Qt provides a full application framework around the web engine makes Qt WebEngine truly an unparalled web engine API.
The new Qt WebChannel module acts as the bridge between QML/C++ and HTML/JavaScript allowing you to expose QObjects into the web context.
For platforms that do not allow distribution of Qt WebEngine as well as use cases where a full-blown web engine is not needed Qt 5.4 will introduce a technology preview of a new module called Qt WebView. It supports embedding the native web engines of the underlying operating system into Qt, and is currently available for Android and iOS. Because of this, Qt WebView also gives a convenient light-weight solution for simple web document integration. Qt WebView will be available with Qt 5.4 final as a separate add-on.
Qt 5.4 also contains Qt WebKit. It is still supported, but as of Qt 5.4 we consider it done, so no new functionality will be added to it. We are also planning to deprecate Qt WebKit in future releases, as the new Qt WebEngine provides what is needed. In most use cases, migrating from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine is rather straightforward.
Complete Support for Windows Runtime – Use Qt for Windows Store Apps
The Windows Runtime port of Qt saw its first supported beta release with Qt 5.3. With all the feedback we have improved the port a lot and implemented most of the missing APIs. With Qt 5.4 WinRT is now fully supported as a primary deployment platform.
Qt 5.4 provides support for most of the Qt functionality on WinRT, …read more
