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

Understanding the new graphical editor for SCXML

Qt introduced SCXML as a new feature in 5.7, which serves as a notation format for building a sophisticated state machine for your application. A state machine is a mechanism for which a program or a widget of a program changes its properties based on the current state you defined for it. We have seen how a Push Button changes its appearance when the mouse hovers on it or when pressed by the user. These are different states of Push Button and its behavior is determined and executed by the state machine.

With SCXML, you can define a more sophisticated state machine for your program and save it in the human-readable SCXML file format for Qt to parse and process. Qt will then generate C++ classes according to the content of the SCXML file to drive the state machine you defined earlier. Qt also provides a graphical editor for you to...