News emerged recently that Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) were working on their first IDE for Qt, code named Project Greenhouse. Today saw the release of the first technical preview under the name Qt Creator. The initial release is binary only, and under the terms of the Qt preview license, but the final release will be released with source code under a GPL compatible license. The initial release is available for Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Read on for a users review.

The Greenhouse project began as a research project within Trolltech. We are told that the design is entirely plugin based, suggesting that ultimately we will have the ability to add support for new languages, debuggers etc. The documentation suggests a plugin for the CMake build system used by KDE is in the works. At the moment things are a little too bare for the benefits of this approach to be readily apparent, but it is a sensible approach to take when developing an IDE.

Unusually for the dot, I have decided to look at the Windows install of Qt Creator. The reason I have chosen to do this is that I have tried to get applications working with the open source Qt version for Windows before with little success, it has always been more trouble than I have time for. Hopefully the combined Qt+IDE+Mingw package will make this a pretty painless experience, which will bode well for future work on KDE on the windows platform.

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