Document about Genode's native Qt4 port available Jul 06, 2009

The document "Portierung von Qt auf Genode" (german) describes the undertaking of making the Qt4 framework natively available on Genode. Among many technical insights, it provides an overview about the integration with Genode's GUI, and explains how Qt4's low-level interfaces are mapped to native Genode functionality.

Qt4 is a popular and versatile C++ framework for developing platform-independent GUI applications. In addition to GUI-related functionality, Qt4 covers a comprehensive library of data structures and platform abstractions. It is widely used for both commercial and open-source applications, most prominently, it serves as the foundation of the KDE project.

Since the release 9.05, the official distribution of Genode supports Qt4 as a regular feature. The document "Portierung von Qt auf Genode" (german) describes the challenging endeavor of porting this high-complexity C++ framework to Genode. Major problems to overcome had been the missing C library (at the time when the project started), the integration of the Qt4 project files with Genode's build system, the adaption of Qt4 to the basic primitives provided by Genode, and the integration of Qt4 with Genode's GUI. In addition to the mentioned technical insights, the document evaluates the achieved solution with respect to compatibility and maintainability.

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