Santa Clara, CA and Oslo, Norway — (press release excerpt) — Trolltech today announced the debut of ActiveQt, a new framework designed to help Qt developers speed and simplify the use of ActiveX controls in Qt applications, and to more easily create their own ActiveX servers. Qt, Trolltech's popular C++, multi-platform application framework, lets developers create single-source applications that run… natively on Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X and embedded Linux.

A pre-release version of ActiveQt, which is built for Qt/Windows, will be demonstrated in booth number 1026 at the Software Development Conference and Expo at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA April 22 to 26.

ActiveX is a powerful, widely used technology for defining a set of interfaces for both the client side and the control side. The main use is to provide user interface elements that can be embedded into applications. Given its generic API, however, writing or using ActiveX controls can be cumbersome, requiring the use of a variety of wizards and different kinds of generated code. ActiveQt eliminates this pain and tedium by making ActiveX behave in a way that is familiar to Qt programmers.

QAxWidget makes ActiveX methods, properties, and events available as Qt slots, properties, and signals. This means that Qt developers can use ActiveX controls just like standard Qt widgets. Similarly, the framework simplifies exposure of QWidget subclasses as ActiveX controls. Such classes are implemented like any other Qt class, but can be used as standard ActiveX controls by ActiveX client applications and scripting engines. A static library implements the functionality required to turn a standard Qt executable into an ActiveX control server.

ActiveQT, now available for beta testing, is scheduled for public release in the third quarter of 2002.

 
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