Chapter 17
Programming KDE Using Qt
In Chapter 16, you looked at the GNOME/GTK+ GUI libraries for creating graphical user interfaces under X. These libraries are only half of the story; the other big player on the GUI scene in Linux is KDE/Qt, and in this chapter you look at these libraries and see how they shape up against the competition.
Qt is written in C++, the standard language in which to write Qt/KDE applications, so in this chapter you’ll be obliged to take a diversion from the usual C and get your hands dirty with C++. You might like to take this opportunity to refresh your memory on C++, especially reminding yourself of the principles of derivation, encapsulation, method overloading, and virtual functions.
In this chapter, we cover
- An introduction to Qt
- Installing Qt
- Getting started
- Signal/slot mechanism
- Qt widgets
- Dialogs
- Menus and toolbars with KDE
- Building your CD database application with KDE/Qt
Introducing KDE and Qt
KDE (K Desktop Environment) is an open source desktop environment based on the Qt GUI library. A host of applications and utilities are part of KDE, including a complete office suite, a Web browser, and even a fully featured IDE for programming KDE/Qt applications (KDevelop, covered in Chapter 9). Industry recognition of how advanced KDE’s applications are came when Apple chose to use KDE’s Web browser as the core of the primary Web browser for Mac OS X, called Safari, known as a very fast browser.
The KDE project’s homepage is at http://www.kde.org ...
