CuteBuilder

CuteBuilder 0.8.1 is finally available. I planned to release the version 0.9 a couple of months ago, but I could not make it and there is still a lot of work to do, so I decided to make this intermediate release. The most notable changes of this updated version are:

• Visual C++ 2010 (Beta 2) support have been added. Qt does not support it yet (4.6.1), but CuteBuilder will propose you to use VC++ 2008 settings - I didn’t really test if it works.
• it is now possible to build both in debug and in release (-debug-and-release)
• options have been added in order to avoid the build of modules QtScript, QtScriptTools, multimedia and declarative (if available).
• on-line registration and error reporting now support a proxy configuration. As a result you will be proposed to register again if it failed before, but also if you declined - sorry for that, but this time the app will remember you declined. If you fail to configure the proxy, please tell me!
• 64 bits cross-compiler “support” have been removed because it doesn’t work.
• some issues specific to Windows Vista/Seven were fixed. I recently moved from XP to Seven, and I never tested CuteBuilder on it before. And I discovered that on Vista/Seven CuteBuilder failed to kill the launched processes if you click on Cancel - now it is solved.

Many people reported to me the bug Applying the options to the mkspec .conf file failed. I couldn’t find why and how you get this error, and so I wasn’t able to fix it. But I added some error reporting stuff, so if you have this error and you accepted to register, I will receive more info about what happened, and may be I will be able to understand what’s wrong. I also noticed that quite a lot of users still fail to build Qt, and I couldn’t figure out why as some people fail with exactly the same options / version than others who succeed. It seems many people try to build from the mingw package source code instead of the plain source archive. But I know it is not the only reason. That’s something I will try to better understand in the future. Anyway, CuteBuilder 0.8.0 was useful enough to be downloaded more than 1588 times!

The last thing to mention is the huge size of the 0.8.1 executable: 15.5 Mo! The size of version 0.8.0 was 12.8 Mo, and version 0.7.0 was 10.1 Mo. It is an impressive growth, and in my opinion the main responsible is not me but Qt - more specifically QtWebKit. When CuteBuilder 0.9 will be ready to be released, I will start to investigate that point. As I promised, I will share my conclusions. After all, it is still me main goal of this project: improve Qt experience.

If you don’t want to miss the articles I plan to write (in a couple of months) on how to optimize your Qt builds with CuteBuilder, just send me a message with your email and I will inform you when I publish something (this is also a good way for me to find the motivation!). Of course, I won’t use your email for something else…

Stay tuned!

CuteBuilder 0.8.0 is available. This version corrects the main weaknesses of previous version:

• Fixed the dual licensing issue with Qt 4.5.1: CuteBuilder 0.7.0 could not compile Qt 4.5.1 because configure.exe now first asks to choose between Commercial or Open Source license. This is why you remained stuck at the configuration stage it you tried to compile Qt 4.5.1. For now, CuteBuilder always chooses the Open Source license. If you want CuteBuilder to allow you to choose the Commercial license, please contact me.
• Introduced compiler profiles: this new version of CuteBuilder allows you to customize each compiler settings. The direct benefit of this new feature is that CuteBuilder supports Visual C++ 2005 Express: just add the Windows SDK in the compiler profile and click Next! Management of third party libraries and SDKs (Direct3D SDK, PostgresSQL libpq driver, …) will be improved in the future.
• Added a must have feature: it is now possible to restrict the compilation of Qt parts: you can avoid the compilation of all the parts of Qt and only compile the libraries & tools for example. This new feature works in combinaison with the existing options restrincting the libraries being used (-no-phonon, -no-webkit, …).

This new release of CuteBuilder has been tested on Qt 4.5.0 & Qt 4.5.1. The older is the version of Qt you want to compile, the more likely some features won’t work or even cause the compilation to fail. But as I can observe in the feedbacks sent by the registered users, most of you are just interested in compiling the latest version of Qt, so this is what I am focusing on. Just contact me if you want to compile older releases and you are experiencing problems with it.

In addition to these essential new features, I also worked on improving the support of Visual C++ 2008:

• I was contacted to know if I could add the support of jom, a nmake clone developped by Jörg from Qt Labs in order to Speed up Visual C++ Qt Builds on multi-core processors. Actually, Visual C++ offers the -MP option, wich allows multiple instances of the compiler to run at the same time. So I added a new Visual C++ option: Use Multiple Processes (/MP) (detailed here). This new option is checked by default if more than one (logical) processor are detected. This should do the same work than jom. However, this option is not officially supported by Visual C++ 2005, so it is not available with this compiler.
• I also added the experimental support of 64 bits: CuteBuilder now detects the x64 cross-compilers (AMD64 and Intel64) shipped with Visual C++ 2008 Express. The support of these compilers is experimental, wich in other words means it does not work (Qt compilation fails immediately). My goal is actually to create some interest in this feature so people having experience with 64 bits compilation help me to make it work with CuteBuilder. If you are one of them, just contact me!

Now, a few notes about CuteBuilder 0.7.0.

CuteBuilder 0.7.0 was downloaded 1400 times, and more than 500 users accepted to register. Being a registered user means CuteBuilder sends feedbacks to this website about what is going well… and wrong.

In the future, I plan to share my conclusions about Qt and Visual C++ on this website, based on my own experience and the feedbacks sent by registered users. In particular, how to better optimize your final executable, is Whole Program Optimization worth it, etc. This is my way to thank you for your cooperation.

As a conclusion to this post,  it seems that none of you used CuteBuilder 0.7 to build a Commercial version of Qt. I guess it means CuteBuilder doesn’t handle properly these versions. As I do not own such a license, I need your help to support Commercial versions of Qt. Just contact me!

Happy coding with Qt!

I am happy to announce the release of the first version of CuteBuilder. It is still a Beta version, but it should be stable enought so the next release a stable one. This first release was successfuly tested with Qt 4.4.3 Open Source and Qt 4.5 Tech Preview, both with Visual C++ 2008 Express only.

Few remarks about CuteBuilder 0.7.0:

• Compared to formal QtBuilder, the wizard was redesigned. Now, all the configuration settings are chosen before compilation, so you can first completely configure your build process, and then let it run automatically without having to wait for the end of qmake compilation for example.
• An on line “registration” feature was added in order to make it possible for me to get some feedback about any problem you have building Qt with CuteBuilder. You are free to accept this “registration” or not. It also give me an idea of the number of people using CuteBuilder, and will inform you of any new CuteBuilder release. In the long term, this feedback system should move in the direction of a CDash board.
• The trick with mt.exe was removed, as it is no longer needed with Visual C++ 2008 (see the corresponding Qt Knowledgebase entry). On the other hand, it may be a problem with Visual C++ 2005 if you want to use the static version of the CRT. Actually the support of Visual C++ 2005 is broken in this version, at least for VC++ 2005 Express as there is no way to configure the Platform SDK. But the next version of CuteBuilder should add a way to configure libraries (not only the PSDK…).
• Some options where added, in particular -no-webkit and -no-phonon, as I experienced some trouble compiling Phonon in static or WebKit with Whole Program Optimization. Actually the compilation of Qt 4.4.3 can easily fail in static, I got many weird errors that I will try to document here. In the future, CuteBuilder should offer a way to restrict the compilation of Qt to the library source code only, as problems arise most of the time in the examples, and also because it can be very very long to compile the whole source if WPO is turned on.
• In the future, CuteBuilder should also propose to run “make clean” after the compilation finished, as it can help to save a lot of disk space.

I hope you will enjoy this new version and that it will help you to use Qt, as it is in my opinion a very valuable development platform which is as much a rich and powerful framework that it is unknown and unused. Happy coding!