Preliminary planning for Qt 5.4 content, features not yet frozen

What is new in Qt 5.4

New Features

• Qt GUI:
  • QOpenGLContext is now able to adopt existing native contexts (EGL, GLX, …). This allows interop between Qt and other frameworks, like game engines.
  • OpenGL ES 3.0/3.1 support is improved. The header file for the highest usable ES version (gl31.h, gl3.h or gl2.h) is now automatically included by Qt’s headers in -opengl es2 builds. Vertex array objects, framebuffer blits and multisampling are now supported via the standard GLES3 functions, where applicable.
  • Dynamic OpenGL implementation selection on application startup is now available on Windows when configured with -opengl dynamic. This allows using either opengl32.dll or ANGLE’s OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation in Qt and applications without the need for two separate builds of the binaries.
  • QOpenGLWidget: The modern replacement for QGLWidget and the counterpart of QQuickWidget.
  • QOpenGLWindow: Convenience class for performing OpenGL drawing onto a QWindow.
  • QRasterWindow: Covenience class for performing software-based drawing via QPainter onto a QWindow.
  • Support for 10-bit per color channels images. These can be rendered to and from, though internally the raster engine will still only use 8-bit per color channel. If used as the internal format of a QOpenGLFramebufferObject the OpenGL paint engine is able to render in full precision if supported by the OpenGL driver.

• Qt Widgets
  • Improved scaling of widget styles based on DPI.

• Qt Quick:
  • QQuickRenderControl is made public. This API allows efficient rendering of Qt Quick 2 scenes into framebuffer objects. The contents can then be used in arbitrary ways in Qt-based or 3rd party OpenGL renderers.
  • Introduced overlay and “pull back” headers and footers for ListView

• Qt Quick Controls
  • Android style

• Qt Bluetooth
  • Support for Bluez5
  • Bluetooth Low Energy (under development but not 100% confirmed)

• QPA plugins
  • XCB will now support screen with a depth of 30 (10 bit per color channel).

• Qt WebEngine
  • New module with a web engine based on Chromium.

• Qt WebKit
  • Added support for OpenGL accelerated 2D canvas.

• Qt WebChannel
  • Introduction of a new module to bridge the gap between QML/C++ and HTML/JavaScript for Qt WebKit and other browser engines.

• Qt Windows Extras
  • Multiple thumbnail images when hovering over an application’s taskbar.

Deprecated features

• Qt GUI:
  • The Qt OpenGL module, that is, the QGL* classes are deprecated since QGLWidget can now be replaced by QOpenGLWidget.

• Qt WebKit
  • The Qt WebKit QML module will be replaced by Qt WebEngine’s QML APIs.

Categories:

• Developing_with_Qt
  • Qt 5