Systems in Motion is proud to finally release v1.0.0 of the SoQt
library.

SoQt is our library for gluing the Coin 3D visualization library into
applications employing the Qt toolkit from Troll Tech to build 2D user
interfaces.

The SoQt library is also still fully compatible with the
implementations of the Inventor API from SGI and TGS.

SoQt provides a class-hierarchy of viewer classes that ranges from a
simple render canvas (the SoQtRenderArea), providing only the basic
synchronization and device input conversion routines between Qt and
Coin, up to 3 different full-featured viewer classes
(SoQtExaminerViewer, SoQtPlaneViewer and SoQtFlyViewer) with input
device handling logic and user interfaces to let the application
programmer do Rapid Application Development.

SoQt has been in "beta state" for a long time, during which time we
have had steady progress with regards to stability, compatibility
issues, and bug elimination.  We are now confident that we have a
release-quality codebase for SoQt, with a stable application
programmer's interface (API) and application binary interface (ABI).


SoQt is released under two different licenses:

        1) As Free Software, under the GNU project's General Public
           License ("GNU GPL").

        2) The Coin Professional Edition License ("Coin PEL"). This is
           a license granting developers the rights to use SoQt in
           commercial / proprietary software, in just about any
           setting they want.

SoQt can of course be freely used under the GNU GPL (within the
restrictions of the license), while a fee to Systems in Motion is
involved in granting developers the rights to use the SoQt library
under the Coin PEL.

Note that holders of the Coin PEL are allowed to freely use *any* of
the libraries in the Coin family: these currently includes libCoin,
SoQt, SoWin, SoGtk, SoXt, Dime and Profit.

See <URL:http://www.coin3d.org> for more information about the Coin
PEL and the Coin family of libraries.

(Note: up until the final 1.0.0 version, the Free Software license for
SoQt was the GNU Lesser General Public License ("GNU LGPL", and not
the GNU GPL. This was a change we had to make to better accommodate
our business model. The older codebase under the GNU LGPL will still
indeterminently be available from our FTP site. See below.)


Below follows the download instructions.  For users of CVS who plan on
continuing to follow Coin/SoQt development through CVS, there is an
important change explained below - make sure you don't miss it.

We will regularly package up new bugfix releases of the libraries into
sourcecode archives for distribution on the FTP site whenever we feel
this is justified by the number and/or severity of the fixed bugs.

Source Code by FTP:
  ftp://ftp.coin3d.org/pub/coin/src/SoQt-1.0.0.tar.gz

Source Code by CVS:
  We have forked off a separate repository for SoQt 1.* instead of
  making a branch in the development repository.  The new repositories
  have the module name suffix "-1" ("-" + major version number).  To
  download the SoQt 1.0 branch, use this cvs command:

    cvs -z3 -d :pserver:cvs@cvs.coin3d.org:/export/cvsroot co SoQt-1

  Login for cvs@cvs.coin3d.org is still done with "cvs" as password.

  The repository "SoQt" will from now on contain our development
  sourcecode.  This might be occasionally unstable, unportable and are
  likely to break ABI-compatibility often (meaning those who follow
  them will have to recompile applications linking against SoQt).

  So, for those whose main interest is not development of the SoQt
  library itself, but SoQt application development: if you still want
  to follow CVS we strongly suggest switching to the SoQt-1
  repository, which is the repository future releases will come from.

We do not yet provide pre-compiled binary packages of the SoQt library
for any platform. The reason behind this is that the Qt library on
which SoQt depends can be installed on client systems in so many
different configurations and under different names, that this task
seems difficult to do in a way that will be useful for the majority of
our users.


Regards,

  Morten Eriksen,
  Coin Project Leader, Systems in Motion
