Book Image

Cross-Platform Development with Qt 6 and Modern C++

By : Nibedit Dey
Book Image

Cross-Platform Development with Qt 6 and Modern C++

By: Nibedit Dey

Overview of this book

Qt is a cross-platform application development framework widely used for developing applications that can run on a wide range of hardware platforms with little to no change in the underlying codebase. If you have basic knowledge of C++ and want to build desktop or mobile applications with a modern graphical user interface (GUI), Qt is the right choice for you. Cross-Platform Development with Qt 6 and Modern C++ helps you understand why Qt is one of the favorite GUI frameworks adopted by industries worldwide, covering the essentials of programming GUI apps across a multitude of platforms using the standard C++17 and Qt 6 features. Starting with the fundamentals of the Qt framework, including the features offered by Qt Creator, this practical guide will show you how to create classic user interfaces using Qt Widgets and touch-friendly user interfaces using Qt Quick. As you advance, you'll explore the Qt Creator IDE for developing applications for multiple desktops as well as for embedded and mobile platforms. You will also learn advanced concepts about signals and slots. Finally, the book takes you through debugging and testing your app with Qt Creator IDE. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build cross-platform applications with a modern GUI along with the speed and power of native apps.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
6
Section 2: Cross-Platform Development
8
Section 3: Advanced Programming, Debugging, and Deployment

GUI testing tools

You can easily evaluate one or more classes as unit tests, but we have to manually write all of the test cases. GUI testing is an especially challenging task. How can we document user interactions such as mouse clicks without coding them in C++ or QML? This question has baffled developers. There are a number of GUI testing tools available on the market that help us do this. Some of them are expensive, some of them are open source. We will discuss a few such tools in this section.

However, you may not need a complete GUI testing framework. Some issues can be figured out with simple tricks. For example, while working with the GUI, you may also have to inspect different properties such as the alignment and boundaries of visual elements. One of the easiest ways is to add a Rectangle to inspect the boundary as shown in the next code:

Rectangle {
    id: container
    anchors {
        ...