Qt Software to discontinue Qt Jambi after 4.5 release

**yop** · 19th February 2009, 17:19

How does this sound to you regarding QtJambi's future?
I don't see an active community around it (totally different situation than Qt) and all the java people seem to lean towards the established swt and swing. I must admit that it seems to me that QtJambi will become a distant memory after sometime

It's a pitty because I had hopes that it would become the industry standard for java desktop development.

**boblebel** · 19th February 2009, 18:29

What?? Is this official, or are you speculating? Where is this news?

This would be really unfortunate because i chosed qtjambi over both swt and swing for my current project, and so far i'm in love. With the new licence, i would have expected qtjambi to take off.

**boblebel** · 19th February 2009, 18:36

Just found it on the site. Dammit...

"Qt Jambi -- a port of Qt to the Java programming language -- will be discontinued in order to focus resources on the Qt cross platform application and UI framework. Qt Jambi will be maintained for one year after the March 2009 release of Qt Jambi 4.5.0_01, and will be made available upon release on http://labs.qtsoftware.com under the LGPL license."

**seneca** · 19th February 2009, 19:06

Sad, but understandable.

This has however chance to live successfully as community project.

**yop** · 20th February 2009, 00:44

Originally Posted by boblebel

What?? Is this official, or are you speculating? Where is this news?

This would be really unfortunate because i chosed qtjambi over both swt and swing for my current project, and so far i'm in love. With the new licence, i would have expected qtjambi to take off.

Unfortunately it's official: http://www.qtsoftware.com/about/news...ease-available

**rexi** · 20th February 2009, 17:50

I was always wondering how many people actually used Qt Jambi. I have always shyed away from it because I found it quite a hassle to set up and deploy an application with all the dependencies to use Qt Jambi. It looks like there weren't enough people using it, after all...

I really like the idea of Qt Jambi, though. It surely beats Swing as a GUI toolkit for Java, in my opinion, and definitively beats SWT API-wise. But the rest of the library is mostly a duplication of efforts, as Java's standard library is pretty comprehensive for everything a developer might need nowadays.

**boblebel** · 20th February 2009, 18:54

Originally Posted by rexi

I was always wondering how many people actually used Qt Jambi. I have always shyed away from it because I found it quite a hassle to set up and deploy an application with all the dependencies to use Qt Jambi. It looks like there weren't enough people using it, after all...

Btw, deployment is now super easy, you just need to include 2 jar files and things just work.

I wish more people would try it. I'm a bit puzzled by the apparent lack of interest in the java community. Once you get a taste, it's hard to go back to any other toolkit.

**rexi** · 20th February 2009, 19:51

Originally Posted by boblebel

Btw, deployment is now super easy, you just need to include 2 jar files and things just work.

No need to include the underlying C++ libraries?

Originally Posted by boblebel

I wish more people would try it. I'm a bit puzzled by the apparent lack of interest in the java community. Once you get a taste, it's hard to go back to any other toolkit.

I totally agree on the GUI side of things. Qt beats everything Java has, be it Swing or the even worse SWT. But I think that's a matter of taste. I started with Java and Swing before I got to Qt and C++, and I definitively prefer Qt's approach to GUI design (Designer is really great, while there is no Java GUI editor I don't utterly dislike

), though I still prefer Java over C++ as a language.

I can understand the lack of interest by Java developers, as Qt Jambi adds yet another GUI toolkit, while not providing anything else of interest. For C++, Qt provides what should have been provided by projects like the STL or Boost: a comprehensive set of functionality that should have been part of the language in the first place. Java has all of this already, by providing a really comprehensive standard library. Sadly, combined with a too complicated GUI toolkit

I was hoping that Qt Jambi might get some gain now that Java has been Open Source'd and was ready to be adopted by projects like KDE. There, the tight integration between Java (as the language) and Qt (as the toolkit) might have been able to make a big difference. But now it seems this is not going to happen. I know Qt Jambi wasn't intended for this in the first place, and so far I haven't seen much of a "Qt Jambi community". I'm afraid this (actually great) idea is going to die once the Trolls end working on it, but I definitively hope I am wrong.

**boblebel** · 20th February 2009, 20:50

Originally Posted by rexi

No need to include the underlying C++ libraries?

One of the jar is a 10mb file that contain all the dlls. (At runtime, they are automatically extracted from the jar)

**yop** · 21st February 2009, 07:30

I strongly think that this was a very good opportunity for java to shine on the desktop where it lacks. Also there is a very large java community and adoption of Qt could only mean good things for Qt itself.

I think that QtJambi was not marketed heavily enough in the first place and now it is not worth the trouble for Nokia to keep it maintained sine there are no big players using it. Hopefully there are out there some companies that have based a product on QtJambi and will pick it up because unfortunately the community, as a consequence of the lack of marketing and adoption, was never built (in the mailing list you just see questions answered by the QtJambi developers and no actual participation).

Anyway we all have our list with the pros and cons of Qt and QtJambi for me kept all the pros and ditched most of the cons. With QtJambi the only things that were still bothering me were the non native widgets and the slots that are passed in functions as text. No mocs no nothing there.