4/02/2012

Qt Commercial 4.8.1 comes to QNX Neutrino RTOS

QNX patient-monitoring demo
equipped with a Qt-based UI.
If you didn't read the Qt Commercial Blog last week, you probably missed out on important news: The latest release of the Qt Commercial framework not only offers 200 functional improvements over its predecessor, but also introduces support for the QNX Neutrino RTOS.

According to blog's author, Tuukka Turunen (cool name, that), "Developers looking to develop their products on QNX with Qt Commercial can rest assured that Digia... supports their project with a full support and services team." This is welcome news for the many developers who'd like to use Qt and the QNX Neutrino RTOS together in a commercial device or application.

If you're new to Qt, it's a popular framework for writing applications and graphical user interfaces. It's also cross-platform: You can write your applications once and deploy them across multiple desktop and embedded operating systems, without having to rewrite your source code. This "write once, deploy across" feature helps explain why a number of QNX customers — particularly those in the medical industry — have asked for Qt Commercial support.

In case you're wondering, Qt Commercial is a, well, commercial version of Qt. :-)  It's available from Digia, a Finnish company that offers licensing, support, and services to companies who wish to Qt in commercial applications, on either desktop or embedded platforms.

If you visit here often, you may have already seen the QNX patient-monitoring demo, which sports a user interface built with Qt. But if you haven't, check out this video filmed at last year's Embedded World Conference in Nuremburg. Among other things, the video showcases some nifty BlackBerry PlayBook integration:



Any chance you'll be in Moscow on April 19? If so, you can meet up with Digia at QNX Russia 2012, the largest event for the Russian QNX community.
 

5 comments:

Mitchell Schoenbrun said...

I'm getting up to speed on Qt. It seems like a nice addition to QNX but there are some issues that are concerning.

The open source port, which the commercial version is based on will not display under Photon. As far as I can tell this is a pointless political decision. The point being Photon is being depricated and will not be available in the future. Ok, so how do I develop for Qt self hosted? One answer I got was using command line QNX, not GUI at all. Really? I think not. It feels like QNX is going to the cross development model only. Decades of experience tell me that this is a terrible idea.

Paul N. Leroux said...

Hi Mitchell. I'm sure it wasn't a political decision, but I certainly understand your preference for a self-hosted option. I'm asking around about this, but I'm *guessing* that the vast majority of customers are expecting a cross-development model... despite the advantages of self hosted...

umesh said...

Is Qt package compiled with QNX Momentics IDE? I am planning for my device, looking for procedure to cross compile and run on top of QNX

Paul N. Leroux said...

Hi umesh. I'm not sure of how it's packaged. Will look into this and post an answer.

Paul N. Leroux said...

Umesh, it's my understanding that we have a prepackaged version of Qt 5.3.1 available with the QNX SDK for Apps and Media 1.1. This is the LPGL variant of Qt which has been ported to QNX and compiled with the tools in the QNX Momentics IDE. It runs on QNX 6.6.

Hope this helps; send an inquiry to info@qnx.com if you need to speak to someone about licensing QNX.

- Paul