Today, we released the third and final tech preview of Qt Jambi. At the same time, Trolltech announced a contest for Qt Jambi developers, so if you're interested in getting some loot, go download the new package, make something awesome and send it to us.
About the release, though, I'm especially excited about this one, primarily because it's based on Qt 4.2, and thus gets to benefit from all the nifty new features in Qt. On Windows and Linux, you can still use Java Webstart to run the demo launcher without manually unpacking and installing anything. The link is on the download page, and here's a quick run-down of what to look out for:
QGraphicsView
One of the highlights of Qt Jambi TP3 is the 2D canvas QGraphicsView. It's an extremely useful, item-based canvas API capable of handling millions of items efficiently. The items can be vector graphics, text, pixmaps, et cetera, collision detection is built-in, it's based on a model/view architecture, and everything about it is in general very pleasing. Here's a bunch of colliding mice:
com.trolltech.qt.svg
Although SVG support was introduced to Qt in version 4.1, it has not been included in previous Qt Jambi releases. We've added this package as well in TP3, and there's even a hot new example of how well it plays together with graphics view.
Javadocs
One common request from our users so far, has been to add javadocs to the Qt Jambi packages. This has been our plan all along, and in this latest release, we finally have documentation for the Qt Jambi API in javadoc format. This means that, if you are using Eclipse for your Qt Jambi development, you can get easy access to documentation in the code completion list as you write your code. All you need to do is edit the build path entry for your qtjambi.jar file in the properties of your project, and add the location of the javadoc there. Here's a screenshot to make it easier:
What else?
There's actually so much new stuff in TP3 that giving everything a separate paragraph would make the blog infinitely long (approx.) Some of the stuff you might want to read more about though, is
There's a lot more as well. You could read the Qt 4.2 intro to see some of it. Hope you have fun trying out all the new stuff and don't forget to enter the contest.