Book Image

Application Development with Qt Creator - Third Edition

By : Lee Zhi Eng, Ray Rischpater
Book Image

Application Development with Qt Creator - Third Edition

By: Lee Zhi Eng, Ray Rischpater

Overview of this book

Qt is a powerful development framework that serves as a complete toolset for building cross-platform applications, helping you reduce development time and improve productivity. Completely revised and updated to cover C++17 and the latest developments in Qt 5.12, this comprehensive guide is the third edition of Application Development with Qt Creator. You'll start by designing a user interface using Qt Designer and learn how to instantiate custom messages, forms, and dialogues. You'll then understand Qt's support for multithreading, a key tool for making applications responsive, and the use of Qt's Model-View-Controller (MVC) to display data and content. As you advance, you'll learn to draw images on screen using Graphics View Framework and create custom widgets that interoperate with Qt Widgets. This Qt programming book takes you through Qt Creator's latest features, such as Qt Quick Controls 2, enhanced CMake support, a new graphical editor for SCXML, and a model editor. You'll even work with multimedia and sensors using Qt Quick, and finally develop applications for mobile, IoT, and embedded devices using Qt Creator. By the end of this Qt book, you'll be able to create your own cross-platform applications from scratch using Qt Creator and the C++ programming language.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
7
Section 2: Advanced Features
12
Section 3: Practical Matters

Your main application and its menus

In order to use Qt Widgets, you need to do two things. First, you need to ensure that you include the widgets module in your project by adding the following line in your project's .pro file:

QT += widgets 

Second, any file using Qt Widgets should include the QWidgets header as one of its headers. You might also need to include the header files for individual widgets, such as QButton and QMenuBar:

#include <QWidgets> 

Qt provides the QGuiApplication class (a subclass of QCoreApplication) to manage your application's life cycle, including the event loop required by today's GUI platforms. You've already seen QCoreApplication, which we used for our console application in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Qt Creator.

You probably won't do much with QGuiApplication, but there are two signals it offers that are good for...