Grim Gjonnes, director of Sales, Trolltech talks to Prashant L Rao about the company’s popular development framework, Qt, that has been used to create projects such as KDE (the popular Linux GUI) and the software for the Sharp Zaurus PDA

What is Trolltech’s business model?
We make money from sales of the Qt Enterprise Edition that retails for $1,500-4,000 per developer. Another revenue stream is the royalty from sales of PDAs and smartphones running embedded Qt. We make $2-10 per unit sold. Qt has an installed base of 4,000 to 5,000 seats. The product is popular in Oil & Gas (seismic activity monitoring), special effects (Disney uses it) and for EDA (Synopsys uses Qt). 50 percent of Qt sales goes to oil & gas, EDA, animation, medical equipment, automotive and machine tools verticals. The remaining 50 percent is used for building common business applications.

How is Qt positioned vis-à-vis products such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio?
Qt can work in tandem with VS. Developers can use Qt to create the GUI design and compile and edit code in Visual Studio. Qt classes can be used instead of MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) in VS.

Who is using Qt in India?
In India, Qt was earlier used for creating desktop apps. This year the focus has swung to embedded. Mistral is using Qtopia for a PDA. Infomart has its own PDA, again using Trolltech’s tools to create the application software for the device. We are appointing two training partners. Our aim is to follow our European and American customers to India. We had less than 50 customers last year. This year there are over a hundred. The number of customer acquisitions is doubling every year. In India, we have partnered with GT Enterprises and Lineo India.

What is the future of Qt in terms of enhancements planned and new features to come?
In version 3.1 of Qt we will have Active Qt—ActiveX controls in Qt applications. We are adding support for Motif in the next version. There is a huge base of Motif apps in Europe; we’re talking millions of lines of code here.

Trolltech will deliver a module-by-module migration mechanism to Qt. Another planned enhancement is Qt Script for Applications (QSA) that will let customers create scriptable Qt apps. End-users will benefit, as will VARs who will be able to customise horizontal products for a particular vertical. The main part of the application will continue to be developed in Qt and C++, extensions will be created using scripts. The scripting language, Qt Script, is based on the ECMA Script standard—just as JavaScript is. Down the line we plan to launch a pure edition of QSA that will let you create apps from scratch. This stand-alone version would allow the whole main application to be implemented through scripting using Qt Script, thereby allowing programmers with limited coding experience or skills to write complete applications without having to worry about compilation and linking on the target platform. The end-user would also be able to deploy the application (i.e. the script) on any target platform on which the scripting engine is installed. Trolltech has not taken a definite decision about if, how and when a stand-alone Qt Script will be released.

Qtopia 1.6 will improve support for SyncML and allow users to connect to Outlook and download their mail to a PDA. Trolltech is promoting embedded Linux. We have created a basic package. In Qtopia 1.6 you will see support for different screen sizes and a gaming edition.

Windows 2000/XP have good support for Indian languages. What kind of support does Qt offer for Indian scripts?
In 3.1 and later versions, Qt will come with better support for Indian languages. We will give the user the ability to switch languages at runtime. The Unicode rendering in Qt is very advanced, and includes full support for almost all languages, including Far Eastern languages and bi-directional languages like Hebrew and Arabic. However, support for Indic scripts is regrettably not yet up to the same level. For Qt/X11, this is because the base libraries—X11 and glibc—still do not provide much support for this. For example, there is as yet no standard encoding of Indian glyphs in X11, and no proper OpenType support. However, we are seeing that things are slowly improving in this area, and after our upcoming Qt 3.1 release, we want to improve the rendering of Indian languages in Qt.

Direct X is the graphics/multimedia API for MS, what is the interface for Qt?
Qt offers an advanced drawing API that provides all the commonly used 2D graphics drawing commands, as well as more advanced features such as free translation and rotation and image dithering. For 3D graphics, Qt integrates with the industry standard, OpenGL.