How Qt will ease your life

In one of the biggest news stories of the year, Nokia has acquired all of the rights to the Symbian operating system (OS) and open sourced it under the Eclipse license. In one fell swoop, the need for mobile Linux just became far less obvious.

With 60 percent of the mobile market, Symbian has long been the dominant mobile OS. While Nokia has recently been dabbling with Linux, this move presumably will shift its efforts back to Symbian.

Indeed, Nokia’s move may actually completely refactor the mobile industry’s rising affection for Linux. As Glyn Moody suggests, developers already know Symbian and are likely to redouble their efforts there instead of moving to rival platforms like Google’s Android and other mobile Linux platforms.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. It’s not Linux, per se, that is important to mobile. It’s open source. Whether through an open-source Symbian or open-source Linux, the benefits to developers is the same: Transparency, flexibility, and community.

As a reaction to Google Android Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Monorola and NTT DoCoMo are working on a concept uniting SymbianOS, UIQ and MOAP(S). In the first stage the Symbian Foundation has been founded. Goal of this foundation is to make Symbian available for free and then open source.

As Nokia and Symbian already announced, the development will focus on mobile linux distribution like MAEMO, which features for example the entire OpenGL 2.0 engine. The framework that will be supported in the future is a cross-platform application development framework called Qt (pronounced as the English word “cute^“).

Qt is widely used for the development of GUI programs (in which case it is known as a widget toolkit), and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, Google Earth, Skype, Qt Extended, Adobe Photoshop Album, VirtualBox and OPIE. It is produced by Nokia’s Qt Software division, which came into being after Nokia’s acquisition of the Norwegian company Trolltech, the original producer of Qt.

Qt uses C++ with several non-standard extensions implemented by an additional pre-processor that generates standard C++ code before compilation. Qt can also be used in several other programming languages via language bindings. It runs on all major platforms, and has extensive internationalization support. Non-GUI features include SQL database access, XML parsing, thread management, network support and a unified cross-platform API for file handling.

Distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (among others), Qt is free and open source software. This is also one reason why I believe that Qt will probably become one of the most important frameworks (besides Android) for the future.