Qt in a professional setting [closed]

Question

While I have played with parts of Qt in the past I am thinking of putting some real effort into learning it but also wondering what the potential monetary payback might be down the road. So I have some general questions about Qt's future.

What is Qt's place in the job market? Are there many, or do you sense a growing number of installations using it? What are its main competitors?

What kind of enterprise niches does Qt satisfy? Are more corporate applications trying to be cross-platform these days or do most of those efforts go the Java, etc., route?

Since being bought by Nokia I assume Qt has a viable future on mobile devices. Has this in fact been working out? Is Qt pretty much limited to Nokia offerings or does it have a place on Android devices, etc.?

Please feel free to comment on any aspect of Qt's future that I may have missed.

Answer 1

Don't have a real answer for you, but I recently saw this diagram for job trends with various C++ libraries.

Answer 2

I started using Qt in 2007. I liked it a lot, but the price meant that I couldn't use it as much as I would have wanted to.

The Nokia acquisition has been a good thing so far: (ex)Trolltech have completely opened up their development process. You have access to their VCS and bug tracker, you can contribute code, test development snapshots, open and track issues and so on. They value input from the community.

The framework is high quality and very popular in the open source world (KDE comes to mind). LGPL licensing has resulted in a bigger adoption with commercial software developers. This year's DevDays has seen a record attendance.

What is Qt's place in the job market?

I'm not based in the US so I don't know what the situation is over there. Most C++ jobs are MFC in my area. I know of a few places that use Qt.

Are there many, or do you sense a growing number of installations using it?

I've definitely seen more interest in newsgroups/forums/online communities.

What are its main competitors?

.NET on Windows, Cocoa on Mac and GTK+ on Linux. When it comes to C++ only wxWidgets, MFC or WTL could be considered as alternatives, although I would argue that Qt is in a different league from them.

Is Qt pretty much limited to Nokia offerings or does it have a place on Android devices, etc.?

Qt is also available on WinMo/CE and Linux devices. Symbian is not Nokia-only any more. I don't think that we'll see an official Android or iPhone port. Right now they're working full steam on S60 and Maemo support.

Answer 3

They have been around since 1995, and recently some feared that Nokia would buy them to stifle the competition in favour of Symbian. Now that seems definitely out of the way by the way Qt will soon support Symbian and Maemo 5. Seeing the effort they spend in R&D and what their framework already provides on so many platforms, I wouldn't worry about their future.

As an open-source platform, I would venture Android devices are more of a competitor, rather than a possible platform, but it's just a wild guess ;-) There are some fierce debates out there on the subject.

Another real competitor would be .NET, both offer more than just IDE building tools and deal with workstations and the embedded world.

Clifford's advice about not sticking with only one framework is very wise IMHO. Another argument to start with Qt beside the advantage of covering more platforms is that it uses the C++ language, which is more demanding than C#. Starting with that will give you good programming habits, and it will be much easier to investigate something else later, be that a C# or a Java-based framework: you'll have a better idea of what lies behind the scenes of memory management (if that is not already the case, that is), and your code will be potentially more efficient.