Key Organizations in Free & Open-Source Software – Trolltech

Key Organizations in Free & Open-Source Software – Trolltech
By Sunil Tanna

Trolltech ASAis a Norwegian company with its headquarters in Oslo, Norway, that is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The company was founded in 1994, by Eirik Chambe-Eng and Haavard Nord (although they had actually begun writing Qt in 1991).

Trolltech’s principal product is Qt (pronounced “cute”), a multi-platform framework for developing applications – originally GUI applications only, but since version 4, also suitable for use in developing console-based programs and server applications. As well as cross-platform functions for developing GUIs, Qt includes a wide variety of other useful functions, also cross-platform, such as functionss for multi-threading, database access, XML parsing, file manipulation, internationalization, etc.

The Qt framework has been used to develop a wide variety of applications. These include KDE, a popular desktop environment (in fact Trolltech employs several KDE developers), as well as the Opera web browser, Skype, Google Earth, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and OPIE (Open Palmtop Integrated Environment). Qt itself is written in an extended version of the C++ programming language (a special preprocessor is used to add features to standard C++), but the toolkit can in fact be accessed from a variety of programming languages including Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Pascal, C#, and Java, as well as C++.

In 2001, Trolltech introduced Qtopia, a version of Qt adapted for applications on devices running an embedded version of Linux, such as mobile phones, PDAs and other consumer devices. In 2004, a version of Qtopia for smart phones, called Qtopia Phone Edition, was introduced. Qtopia Phone Edition has been subsequently used by Trolltech themselves in their own brand smart phone, named “Greenphone”, which they began selling in 2006.

First published at http://www.osgram.com/news_companies_trolltech.php

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