On Feb. 12, Norway’s Trolltech formally announced its relationship with IBM, which is using Trolltech’s ATopia office application suite as part of its 405LP design. LinuxPlanet caught up with the nine-year-old company’s CEO Haavard Nord to ask him about the IBM deal, the latest on Trolltech’s Qt libraries, the embedded device market, and about what Sun could learn from Trolltech’s dual-licensing scheme.
Interview with Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord: QT Development
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Eugenia Loli
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Nord: Swing is a rather large and slow library on top of Java, and I have not seen any use of Swing in embedded products at all. You need at least a one gigahertz CPU to run Swing applications. Swing is more or less abandoned as a GUI layer for Java. There has been much criticism of Swing. We think that Swing is actually very little used, even on the desktop.
You just have to love European honesty sometimes.
–ms
Norwegian == Good, its that simple.
Yes! Being part Norwegian must be why I have the occasional good moment 😉
–ms
Is is possible to run QT/Embedded on a regular linux box (a pc), and run it using scitech snap drivers for QT/Embedded instead of X11??
Is Qt/C++ a good combination for people jsut starting out with programming/gui programming?
LinuxPlanet caught up with the nine-year-old company’s CEO Haavard Nord…
The CEO is only nine years old?
Sorry, I couldn’t help it.
The CEO is only nine years old?
Sorry, I couldn’t help it.
Yeah, they aren’t real clear about that, is the CEO nine years old or has he been their CEO for nine years?
Yeah, they aren’t real clear about that, is the CEO nine years old or has he been their CEO for nine years?
Well, with the way some company CEOs have been acting (*cough* Enron), I’m not sure if he would be nine years old or not
Just kidding, he’s a good guy, it’s great that Qt has been GPL’ed.
“the nine-year-old company’s CEO”
I believe the company is 9 years old. I am not sure if he has been the CEO the entire time.
Yes, I was attempting to make a (rather lame) joke, since the words can be interpreted either way. Obviously it wasn’t a very funny joke
Although my wife sometimes makes the comment that I behave like a 9 year old, I suppose LinuxPlanet refers to the age of the company. Trolltech was founded in 1994 by Eirik Eng (President) and myself.
Actually, the sentence was quite clear. It’s really not proper usage to say it the other way. The proper way to say the other thing would be “the company’s nine year old CEO.”
Are you just starting out with programming, or GUI programming. Qt is a good way to start out with GUI programming, but if you’re just starting out with programming, don’t come anywhere near a GUI for awhile. GUI program is actually kinda hard. If you’re just starting out, I reccomend something like Python. C++ is very complex (which is its strength and its weakness), while something like Python is very accessible.
To you who wondered if QT was a good thing to start programming in, I will say Yes! It is wery good documneted and the classes are well structred. The documentation also comes with a good “Get started with QT” to get you going.
Isn’t it QTopia?
Actually, I think for the best thing to learn programming is Python. Later on, when you fancy GUI apps, try Qt. Both are very well documentated, which made it extremely easy for me. Of course, practice a lot, me after 4-6 months of not touching it, I completely forgot everything I learnt.
@Michael: Swing Apps don’t require a GHz CPU. If you bear the startup times, they run well on the 333 MHz Pentium II of my workstation.
@Rayiner: I have no experience with QT, but developing GUI Apps with Java is not very difficult, compared to Apps for an Atari ST using the standard old GEM functions. Although Java could be even easier sometimes.
@Sonarman: QT is GPLed? Only free or cheap for dev. free open source apps?
As rajan r says the best thing to learn programming is Python, then when you want those fancy GUI apps, use Qt. The Python bindings for Qt are great so you can continue programing in Python. My only problem are compiling PyQt takes forever on my old box:-) And with Eric3(PyQt) you get a realy nice IDE.
“Nord: Swing is a rather large and slow library on top of Java, and I have not seen any use of Swing in embedded products at all.”
True. Thats why ther is AWT and others to be used with embedded devices utilizing Java.
“You need at least a one gigahertz CPU to run Swing applications. Swing is more or less abandoned as a GUI layer for Java. There has been much criticism of Swing. We think that Swing is actually very little used, even on the desktop.”
Nice lie Nord, but can’t blame you, since you are competing with Swing.
“You need at least a one gigahertz CPU to run Swing applications. Swing is more or less abandoned as a GUI layer for Java. There has been much criticism of Swing. We think that Swing is actually very little used, even on the desktop.”
Nice lie Nord, but can’t blame you, since you are competing with Swing.
On a 300 MHz K6 Swing is unbearable, on 700 Mhz Atlon it is ok, but there is not much reserve under the hood.
Regards,
Marc
700 Mhz is not 1GB. Besides, 1GB is not a big number at all.
Sorry for the typo: 700 Mhz is not 1Ghz. Besides, 1GHz is not a big number at all. Everybody will have it next year or the next one. So, then, nobody will complain about Swing anymore I guess.
LinuxPlanet caught up with the nine-year-old company’s CEO Haavard Nord…
The CEO is only nine years old?
Sorry, I couldn’t help it.
The sentence is quite clear.
nine-year-old describes company’s which is possesive of CEO
Therefor, the CEO belongs to the nine-year-old company.
interesting article, above all concerning where Qt sees its future…
“LinuxPlanet caught up with Haavard Nord, the CEO the nine-year-old company, to ask him about…”
In modern english positionality plays a greater role in determining grammatical/syntatical relationships within a given sentence than do the lexical “markers” of relations or attributes. This is in distinct contrast to most other european langauges where grammatical signification suffices to communicate relations and attributes independent of word order-ie. latin, greek, russian, polish, finnish, magyar etc. Phrases in which a period of time or date is specified *usually* come towards the end of a sentence or one of its constitutive clauses-in german one says “This morning I went to the store” – in enlish we say “I went to the store this morning” (Tempus,Modus,Kausus,Lokalis vs. Kausus, Lokalis, Modus, Tempus)
(oh my how pedantic!)
I think QT is a greater GUI framework, but I’d like to see it optimized.
A simple “Hello World” GUI written in QT on Linux has a
memory footprint of 14MB (That would be the virtual memory size).
Furthermore, most KDE-3.1 apps have a memory footprint above 25 MB, and I believe part of the problem is QT.
A similar program written in
GTK2 has a footprint of 8MB (still high in my opinion).
As a compairson, the most primitive Xlib program displaying “Hello World” using Xft has a memory footprint of 2MB (Not that anybody would write an application using pure Xlib).
Does anybody else have a similar concern, and is there anybody working on optimization?
I meant to say, Qt is a great framework.
DO NOT trust the memory usage reported by top, ps, or whatever. Those numbers include threads, shared memory, maybe buffers and caches and I-don’t-know-how-many-more-things. A Hello World QT app doesn’t really eat 14 MB. A Hello World Xlib app doesn’t really eat 2 MB.
There is no good way to calculate how much memory an app *really* uses. Just remember that the real memory usage is much smaller than the reported value.
The memory information used by ps and top is obtained from /proc/pid/stat or status or statm, if I’m not mistaken.
If the process uses libs which require new threads, shared memory, etc…, then the process is requiring the system to allocate resources in this indirect way. Shouldn’t any non-shared resource be included in the proc’s memory usage?
If you know of any references which explain the problems of calculating memory usage, please let me know.
[i]QT is GPLed? Only free or cheap for dev. free open source apps?</i?
If I Recal Correctly: The deal with the GPL itself is that any code that is a modification on the original GPL code, must also be GPL (or maybe a GPL compatible license). With libraries like Qt, any code that links against the libraries counts as a modification on the library (I believe), so it too must be under the GPL. With the LGPL, on the other hand, programs that link against the library do not need to be under the GPL (although changes to the library itself must be). With the GPL’ed Qt, you have the freedom of the GPL (you can fork Qt, etc.), but you can’t make commercial apps. I think it’s good that way. Open source coders have freedom, and the people at Trolltech can pay the bills.
P.S. Ok, my grammar skills suck. And English is my first language! Isn’t it sad?
And, evidently, my HTML skills suck, too. Only the first line of my previous post was meant to be in intalics.
SciTech SNAP Graphics for QT Embedded allows for fully accelerated 2D graphics with out the need for X11. From what I understand SciTech is also very close to releasing SciTech SNAP Graphics for X11. If the hype is true would allow for accelerated 2D support on 180 chipsets – I’m still waiting for proof on this one;)