CuteBuilder

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!