Introduction to CuteBuilder
CuteBuilder is an Open Source software making it easier to configure and to compile the Qt 4 development framework from Qt Software (formerly known as Trolltech) with Microsoft Visual C++ (2005 or 2008). CuteBuilder is completely free and is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. Its source code is kindly hosted by Tigris.org, in an attempt to participate in its mission of improving Open Source software engineering tools.
Current features
CuteBuilder consists in a wizard which automatically detects the available compilers and configures the build environment to compile Qt with the selected one. It also offers exclusive compiler options which are normally only available to people who have a strong knowledge of both the Qt build system and the Visual C++ compiler.
For example, it is possible to compile a special version of Qt which better exploits the optimizating capabilities of Visual C++ (Whole Program Optimisation / Link-time Code Generation), or to obtain standalone binaries which require no dll installation on the target machine (like msvcr80.dll / msvcp80.dll or msvcr90.dll / msvcp90.dll), which also allows better optimization as there is no DLL boundary.
Future direction
For now, the main goal of CuteBuilder is still to make it easier to build the Qt framework. But some heavy refactoring is being done to prepare the next stage, which is being able to build almost any project based on the qmake build system (which is part of Qt). So CuteBuilder aims to become a graphical front-end to qmake!
Another area of interest is to use CuteBuilder as a tool to automate the build of projects based on qmake in a distributed environment. The main idea is to generate a build log that is automatically posted to a CDash board (a web-based, distributed software quality system). It could also be extended to support self-testing via the QtTest module, in order to progress in the way of a continuous integration tool based on top of qmake…