Lars Knoll, QT project chief maintainer, announced the release of Qt 5.4, offering many improvements in the area of web technologies, full support for Qt on Windows runtime, new features for graphics handling, and a new licensing model.
This is a list of some of the new or improved features:
- Qt WebEngine: a Chromium-based engine to embed Web content in widgets and applications based on Qt Quick.
- Qt WebChannel: a module bridging QML/C++ and HTML/Javascript layers that will allow, e.g., to write an HTML/JS client to communicate over WebSocket with a server.
- Qt WebView: an API allowing to embed a web browser that is native to the underlying operating system. This can used when the full WebEngine is not required or when platform limitations will not allow it, e.g., on iOS.
- Qt for WinRT: integration with the Windows Runtime platform, allowing to write apps for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1, was completed and is now a fully supported part of Qt.
- Support for high DPI displays: still considered experimental.
- Dynamic selection of OpenGL implementation. This is mostly useful on Windows, where traditionally OpenGL support has been "problematic," to allow to choose between the native OpenGL driver and ANGLE's OpenGLES 2.0, or a pure software rasterizer.
- Qt Creator 3.3: a cross platform IDE to create apps for Android and iOS.
- Qt Data Visualization: new features added, including volume rendering and texture support for surface graphs, and performance improvements.
Qt 5.4 includes many more new features, such as Linux support for Bluetooth Low Energy, flat-style controls, 64-bit support for iOS, etc.
Finally, Qt 5.4 has made a decision to move to the LGPLv3 license. This is a step in the direction of "preventing Tivoization" and other misuses. A few modules, such as Qt WebEngine, are only available under the new license, while all modules that existed in Qt 5.3 will still be available under LGPL v2.1.