By Lars Knoll
It’s my pleasure to announce the release of the Qt 5.5 Beta today.
Since we released Qt 5.4, a lot of effort has been put into fixing bugs reported both by our customers and the community. With this in focus, we went through a couple weeks of dedicated bug fixing here at The Qt Company. During this time, we worked 100% on fixing as many open issues as possible. Although the focus of Qt 5.5 has been on stability and performance, it also has some interesting new features and functionality to offer.
3D and OpenGL Features
While Qt has had OpenGL integration and support for many years, the integration was mainly about low level enablers and classes. With Qt 5.5, we are now adding two new modules, that greatly extend our set of 3D APIs: Qt Canvas 3D and Qt 3D.
The first module that makes using 3D easier in Qt is Qt Canvas3D. The module first appeared as a Technology Preview in Qt 5.4, but is now fully supported in Qt 5.5. It provides a WebGL-like API that can be easily implemented using Qt Quick, which greatly simplifies 3D content integration. WebGL itself is a low level API, but Qt Canvas3D can be used in conjunction with JavaScript frameworks such as three.js making loading and displaying 3D content trivial.
Another major new feature, available as a Technology Preview, is the new Qt 3D module. Qt 3D is a module that existed during Qt 4 times, but was never added to Qt 5…yet. Thanks to our partner KDAB, it has now undergone a major refactoring and is an even better solution than the Qt 4 version.
Qt 3D takes our 3D support a good step upwards making it a lot easier to use and integrate 3D content into Qt applications. The module provides both C++ and QML APIs. For more details what Qt 3D 2.0 brings, you can check Qt 3D documentation and KDAB’s series of blogs. Being a Technology Preview, the module still has some rough edges. Please let us know what you think, so that we can turn Qt 3D into a fully supported part of Qt with Qt 5.6.
Qt Quick and Multimedia related news
A good amount of work has gone into improving the QML engine, which is the basis for Qt Quick. Apart from many bug fixes and performance improvements, it now supports JavaScript typed arrays and …read more
Source:: http://blog.qt.io/blog/2015/05/15/qt-5-5-beta-released/
