Throughout the latter part of 2011, we have been working with the new Qt Commercial SDK that enables you to install the essential tools and libraries easier than before – and to keep them up to date with new versions. The SDK can be used to develop applications for all platforms supported by Qt Commercial, including leading desktop platforms such as Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and a large number of embedded and RTOS platforms such as embedded Linux, Windows Embedded, INTEGRITY and QNX.
I am sure that the new SDK will be very beneficial for many Qt developers. It is a great way of installing the Qt Commercial development environment with just the options you need. For those who do not want to jump into the SDK, we will continue to provide the source and binary installers of Qt Commercial libraries in same way as before throughout the lifetime of the 4.8 series.
The first Digia Qt Commercial SDK contains:
- Qt Commercial 4.8.0 libraries
- Full documentation via Qt Assistant
- Qt Commercial Creator 2.4.0 IDE
- Designer, Linguist and other usual Qt development tools
- Cross-compiler toolchain for embedded Linux development
- Example embedded Linux distributions for Beagleboard-xM and PandaBoard
- Update functionality for easy maintenance of the SDK components
Making Embedded Linux Development with Qt Easier
One of the important features of our new SDK is improved support for embedded Linux development. We are introducing a new embedded Linux target in the Qt Creator IDE, cross-compiler toolchain, example configuration for embedded Linux and ready-made images for deploying Qt Commercial on commonly available BeagleBoard-xM and PandaBoard development boards. With these additions it is easier than ever before to start developing with Qt Commercial on embedded Linux, and keep developing with the help of the embedded target in Qt Commercial Creator. Get more details on the development of the embedded Linux SDK from our resident embedded Linux and RTOS Qt Commercial software specalist, Samuli Piippo's blog post.
When new versions of Qt Commercial or Qt Commercial Creator are available, those can be easily updated via the SDK. If You need to add some components along the way, just use the SDK maintenance tool. The first SDK is fully online installer that fetches the selected components from our distribution server. We are looking into providing SDK versions that contain all the tools inside a single offline installer package.
We encourage you to try out the SDK, and send us feedback. We want to improve the SDK, and make it as smooth as possible. For immediate questions, please use the contact form or through the Qt Commercial Customer portal. We will soon launch a user survey to collect your feedback on the first SDK and how would you like us to further develop it.
Try the Qt Commercial SDK for FREE
If you are not a Qt Commercial customer you can try the Qt Commercial SDK wih our 30-day free evaluation. Download here.