Nicholas Sherriff (Nick) - Learn Qt 5: Build modern, responsive cross-platform desktop applications with Qt, C++, and QML

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First published: Febraury 2018

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ISBN 978-1-78847-885-4

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Nicholas Sherriff (Nick) spent the majority of his career at a major utility company in the UK, working predominantly on the Microsoft Windows platform with C#, ASP .NET, and SQL Server . While leading the native application development function there, he experiment ed with C++ before eventually discover ing Qt, utilizing it on a major greenfield project serving several thousand users . He currently works for a communications recording software house. At home, Nick enjoys music, video games, and half-hearted calisthenics .

Marthala Vishnu Vardhan Reddy is an enthusiastic software engineer. He is a Qt software developer and has been working in the automation industry since 2013. He completed his master's in information technology from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He is currently working on the digitization of metal cutting tool data in the manufacturing industry in the direction of Industry 4.0.

He has done his bachelor's thesis from Institut suprieur dlectronique de Paris, France, where he published an IEEE publication on 5G networks as well.

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Qt is a mature and powerful framework for delivering sophisticated applications across a multitude of platforms. It is widely used in embedded devices, including TVs, satellite set-top boxes, medical equipment, car dashboards, and much more. It also has a rich history in the Linux world, with KDE and Sailfish OS using it extensively and many apps in the stores being developed using Qt. It has also made great strides in the mobile arena over the past few years. However, in the Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS X worlds, the dominance of C#/.NET and Objective-C/Cocoa means that Qt is often overlooked.

This book aims to demonstrate the power and flexibility of the Qt framework and show how you can write your application once and deploy it to multiple operating system desktops. The reader will build a complete real-world Line of Business (LOB) solution from scratch, with distinct library, user interface, and unit test projects.

We will cover building a modern and responsive user interface with QML and wiring it up to rich C++ classes. We will control every aspect of our project configuration and output with QMake, including platform detection and conditional expressions. We will build self-aware data entities that can serialize themselves to and from JSON. We will persist those data entities in a database and learn how to find and update them. We will reach out to the internet and consume an RSS feed. Finally, we will produce an installation package so that we can deploy our application onto other machines.

This is a suite of essential techniques that cover the core requirements for most LOB applications and will empower the reader to progress from blank page to shipped application.

This book targets application developers looking for a powerful and flexible framework for creating modern and responsive applications on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux desktop platforms. Although focused on desktop application development, the techniques discussed are largely applicable to mobile development also.

, Hello Qt, covers how to install and configure the Qt Framework and associated IDE, Qt Creator.

, Project Structure , showcases how to create a new multi-project solution that will be the foundation of our example application.

, User Interface , explores the user interface markup language QML and sketches out our UI's layout.

, Style , explains how to give our UI a modern look and feel with shared resources and reusable components.