Froglogic Confident of the Qt Platform's Future

[reggie]

Hamburg, Germany—2011-03-01 froglogic announces its continued support for, and confidence in, the Qt platform. After making significant investments in Qt and MeeGo, Nokia recently announced that it will use Windows Phone as the operating system for its smartphones. As a result many questions about the future of the Qt Platform have been raised. froglogic would like to share its take on the situation and on Qt's future.

Cross-platform software development tools protect software companies from vendor lock-in and makes it much easier to develop and support software for multiple operating system. froglogic considers Qt to be the best toolkit for cross-platform GUI software development in the world of C++ and believes that Qt's immense value to commercial and non-commercial developers will ensure that Qt continues to have a bright future.

froglogic was founded in 2003 by two software engineers who worked for Trolltech (the original makers of Qt) to fill a gap which existed in the market back then. At that time there was no really good tool for an Automated GUI Testing which specifically supported automating GUI applications based on the Qt cross-platform GUI technology. The froglogic founders filled the gap by producing the Squish tool, which was first released in November 2003.

froglogic's Squish has matured over the years (it is now at version 4.0), to become the market-leading GUI testing tool. Squish is used by more than 1,100 companies world-wide, including Nokia, Intel, Siemens, General Electrics, Daimler, T-Systems, Shell, and Cadence. These companies use Squish to test applications that use a wide variety of GUI technologies such as Java (both AWT/Swing and SWT), native Windows, Mac OS X Cocoa, Apple iOS, various Web GUI technologies—and of course, Qt 3 and Qt 4.

Since froglogic's early days, Qt has always played an important role due to the strong ties to Trolltech and to Qt itself. The Squish for Qt edition represents about 40% of froglogic's business while users of Squish for Qt often also use other Squish editions. There is no doubt that the success and growth of Qt has significantly contributed to froglogic's own steady growth and success.

"While the Nokia's latest announcements regarding the change in its smartphone strategy have raised many questions about Qt's future, we believe that Qt, the strategic GUI platform for thousands of companies—and for hundreds of thousands of developers—world-wide, will continue to grow. Nokia recently confirmed that it is committed to Qt and continues to invest in Qt's development and the software engineers who develop it. New MeeGo and Qt based tablet devices such as WebTab and the upcoming Intel MeeGo tablet also show that MeeGo—as one of the many Qt-supported platforms—will continue to evolve."—Harri Porten, co-CEO of froglogic.

Other Qt users—both commercial and non-commercial have announced their support for Qt.

"Another assurance of Qt's future is the continued effort to open up Qt's development under the Open Governance umbrella to allow contributors from outside Nokia, such as KDE (the `K' Desktop Environment) and companies like ourselves and other Qt partners, to actively work on Qt's future on the desktop and on mobile devices. Furthermore, we continue to experience a growth in the interest in our Squish for Qt product, for desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms"—Reginald Stadlbauer, co-CEO of froglogic.

Reginald also highlighted froglogic's continuing commitment to Qt:

"Our upcoming Squish 4.1 release will include support for QML applications and the MeeGo platform among many other improvememts in all the Squish editions. We already have major customers who are using pre-release versions of Squish 4.1 for automating the GUI tests for their Qt and QML applications on recently released and forthcoming MeeGo devices."

It is froglogic's view that Qt will continue to prosper on the desktop, and on mobile and embedded platforms. froglogic itself will continue to support the large number of Squish for Qt customers, and will keep investing in the Squish for Qt edition—just the same as for all the other Squish editions—to ensure that Squish customers can continue to test their applications built with existing Qt versions and with future Qt versions as they become available.

About Squish

Squish is the leading functional, cross-platform GUI and regression testing tool that can test applications based on a variety of GUI technologies, including Nokia's Qt Software Development Frameworks, Java SWT/Eclipse RCP, Java AWT/Swing, native Windows MFC and .NET, Mac OS X Carbon/Cocoa, iOS CocoaTouch, and Web/HTML/AJAX. Squish stands out from other GUI testing tools by giving test engineers the freedom to record and write tests using familiar scripting languages such as JavaScript, Perl, Python, and Tcl. Furthermore, Squish provides extremely tight integration with the specific GUI technologies it supports. This gives testers unprecedented access to the internals of the applications they are testing (to data items, controls, and widgets, etc.), and also leads to the production of very robust and stable GUI tests.

Squish itself, and all the tests created with it, are completely cross-platform, and work on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, and embedded Linux.

If you are interested in evaluating or purchasing Squish, please contact sales@froglogic.com or visit http://www.froglogic.com/squish.

About froglogic

froglogic GmbH is a software company based in Hamburg, Germany. Their flagship product is Squish, the market-leading automated testing tool for GUI applications. More about froglogic is at http://www.froglogic.com.