Two roads diverge

In his 1916 poem, The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost ponders having to decide which way to go at a fork on a wooded trail. In a sense, Qt offers the same dilemma.

For the most part of two decades, Qt had only one technology for GUI development—Qt Widgets. Qt Widgets are built and coded in C++. If you wish to create a custom version of a widget, you are forced to use C++. In 2011, a new method of developing UIs was introduced with the goal of making GUI development, especially on mobile devices, easier and quicker. Instead of coding in C++, a JavaScript-like language (QML) was used and a graphics framework, Qt Quick, was developed.

In this section, we will look at how to create both widget and QML-based GUIs and look at an overview of how they are coded.