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

Introducing signals and slots

In software systems, there is often the need to couple different objects. Ideally, this coupling should be loose—that is, not dependent on the system's compile-time configuration. This is especially obvious when you consider user interfaces—for example, a button press might adjust the contents of a text widget, or cause something to appear or disappear. Many systems use events for this purpose; components offering data encapsulate that data in an event, and an event loop (or, more recently, an event listener) catches the event and performs some action. This is known as event-driven programming or the event model.

Qt offers the signals and slots mechanism as interfaces to manage events, such as the click event, selection change event, text input event, and so on. When a user does something and an event is triggered, the object (that...