Qt has reached another important evolutionary milestone today as Qt 4.8.0 has now been released. Featuring Qt Platform Abstraction, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP and optimized file system access, Qt 4.8.0 can be downloaded as binary or source packages. Here are some key features that are new in Qt 4.8.0:

• Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA). QPA restructures the GUI stack to enable easier porting of Qt to different windowing systems and devices. More info.


• Threaded OpenGL support. Enables those of us that are not OpenGL-ninjas to render OpenGL from more than one thread concurrently. More info.


• Multithreaded HTTP. HTTP requests are now handled in a separate thread by default. This should make application guis smoother, as networking will no longer use the main event loop.


• Optimized file system access. The file system stack received some heavy lifting under the hood. The result is better I/O performance, achieved by reducing the number of system calls performed for I/O and by better use of cached data, when available. The improvements in performance can be seen across all platforms.

Qt 4.8.0 ships with QtWebKit 2.2.1. More details of the major changes can be found in the Qt 4.8 beta blog post. Qt 4.8 Docs are now available on Qt DevNet.