What about Flutter? It will also have similar advantages over HTML as QT.
Yeah I would definitely choose this today. It has only recently become an option though.
The problem is only usable by dart.
Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
81–88 of 88 posts
Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are confused, home routers don't even render HTML but let the insanely powerful client do the actual work. Javascript isn't exactly known for maintainability and clean code either. I'd much prefer C++ for proper applications.
Yes, router was not the best example, it was to illustrate that writing HTML interface is already common, not necessarily GUI. But there are plenty of devices that use HTML for GUI as well, some new PoS terminals comes to mind[0]. 0. https://ingenico.us/smart-terminals/telium-tetra/payment-ter...
I did not find any video on YouTube showing it reacting to user input, go figure... Its CPU is underpowered for any UI that isn't highly optimized native code, and this looks like it's struggling to serve up the few pixels of its relatively low resolution display:
https://youtu.be/hI-gYmwL9hQ?t=1m19s
However they had to use some kind of software rendering due to lack of GPU, and QML with software rendering isn't that fast either.
Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
#83The article does seem to ignore the licensing side of things, where QT is more expensive/restrictive if you're not developing open source projects.
The software is going to be cheaper than the hardware for any company producing quantity of hardware >1000.
For all of the hardware, yes. For the incremental cost of better hardware versus development cost, it makes sense to spend more on development to save hardware between 10k and 100k units.
I have worked on embedded projects for extremely expensive hardware selling in moderate numbers with underpowered SOCs that could not produce smooth UIs. Bad hardware decisions.
Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
#84Html5: easier to develope and deploy
Regarding deployment, you'll need an HTML engine adapted for your embedded platform. That is actually not trivial. Have you done it, or are you just extrapolating from desktop applications? Not a rhethorical question, there may be some Chromium embedded thing...
Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. And if you need on-screen keyboard, there’s no LGPL option available. You have to pay them significant amount of money, and also per-device fee.
There is an API for creating one yourself, I did, not hard at all. Now it might not have a dictionary and other fancy features but it was adapted to our needs and it didn't take long at all to implement.
Not hard for a single language. Languages differ in the way their keyboard should work; not just layout, behavior is also different.
Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
#86I've read through the comments but no one pointed out the main reason people go with Electron: availability of JavaScript / HTML frameworks for... everything.
Oh, you want a sortable editable grid with custom rendering: here, chose from these 3000 libraries. Oh, you want to do that with Qt? Here's a 7-year old forum question with some vague responses that no longer apply to the latest version and only solve 10% of the requirements. Good luck with that!
I can see a professional company with a large development team (and custom solutions / framework) going with Qt. But for a casual developer (or even a startup) there's no way they'd tie themselves to that boulder.
Don't get me wrong, I love C++ and I hate how Electron craps all over my machine resources but when it comes to ease of development, bootstrap, and cost of iterations they're not even in the same ballpark. I wish ReactNative became an actual thing (with proper mac / win32 bindings, and lots of community support for frameworks / libraries), but alas, we're not there yet.
Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, router was not the best example, it was to illustrate that writing HTML interface is already common, not necessarily GUI. But there are plenty of devices that use HTML for GUI as well, some new PoS terminals comes to mind[0]. 0. https://ingenico.us/smart-terminals/telium-tetra/payment-ter...
I did not find any video on YouTube showing it reacting to user input, go figure... Its CPU is underpowered for any UI that isn't highly optimized native code, and this looks like it's struggling to serve up the few pixels of its relatively low resolution display: https://youtu.be/hI-gYmwL9hQ?t=1m19s However they had to use some kind of software rendering due to lack of GPU, and QML with software rendering isn't that…
I have played a little with it live. It uses mixed GUI of legacy graphic sub-system and HTML5. And yes, on HTML5 "apps" it's noticeably slow..
Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of hardware at scale dwarfs the cost of software. If it means paying 5 people a %25 percent premium to save $1m then it's probably worth it.
That's about right. Yet, I think BSH (HAM) will continue to maintain their GUIs on a daily basis since they will want to keep older devices up to date with their IoT ecosystem, too. In the past, once a UI for appliances was written, it stayed the same until the appliance broke down. In a world of IoT, code will become updated on a regular basis. That's why I was questioning the initial development costs vs. maintaini…
I don't have concrete data on this, but can't imagine updating a Qt app to be very difficult. The Qt folks usually tailor well to clients and are pretty supportive.