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Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

embedded-computing.com

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Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#61

Post by xi- »

djsumdog wrote: post #7
mjburgess wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat concerning this has so many votes. I dont see the hackernews crowd being sympathetic with a pdf hidden behind a request for information. Who's voting?

Well there have been some other articles that talk about using Qt, python's built in browser or Python+GTK over electron/HTML5 apps. There are a lot of people out here sick of things like Slack/Discord/Atom which each have the entire Electron framework that weigh in at 80 ~ 150MB. I'd be all for using GTK or QT if there were just better well supported bindings, with good documentation and examples, for languages like…

Qt has very good and well-documented Python bindings (PyQt).

Also, QML has bindings for a lot of languages if you're not comfortable with either javascript or C++ for your backend.

Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#62

Post by sime2009 »

w0utert wrote: post #39
kbart wrote: post #10

I've done both and the real answer is "it depends". If performance is all that matters, the yes, it's Qt hands down. But Qt is also significantly harder to develop and maintain, especially if you want optimized application for minimal hardware.

>> But Qt is also significantly harder to develop and maintain, especially if you want optimized application for minimal hardware. If by that you mean it's easier to hack together some awful JS+HTML compared to hacking together a Qt application, I agree. If you want to build a maintainable, reliable and efficient solution, I don't think there is that much difference between the two. Qt has bindings to many languages,…

Just a side note, but if you are building a commercial/serious product then your language options for Qt shrink down to just C++ and Python. Qt doesn't have many mature and maintained bindings to other languages.

Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#64

Post by omegote »

I've been a full-stack web developer for many years but the last two years I've switched to C++ & Qt development and god is it a pleasure to work with. I only work with Qt Widgets, but I've always wanted to fiddle with QML/QtQuick, although I find the official tutorials lacking.

Any good resources to start working with QML/QtQuick?

Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#65

Post by IshKebab »

kbart wrote: post #22
tjoff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want an optimized application for minimal hardware then surely HTML isn't an alternative anyway? Not sure I agree that QT is harder to develop and maintain, it depends on what you are used to.

"If you want an optimized application for minimal hardware then surely HTML isn't an alternative anyway?" That was the question on linked article. These days HTML becomes viable even on low-end hardware, it's even standard on some appliances (i.e. home routers) and this question is very common. "Not sure I agree that QT is harder to develop and maintain, it depends on what you are used to." General census is that wri…

This is about running a web browser on the device. Home routers don't do that.

Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#66

Post by IshKebab »

asterius wrote: post #38
kbart wrote: post #10

I've done both and the real answer is "it depends". If performance is all that matters, the yes, it's Qt hands down. But Qt is also significantly harder to develop and maintain, especially if you want optimized application for minimal hardware.

Maybe this was the case with Qt4, but Qt5 (that is, QML) is a dream.

I disagree. QML is a nice idea but incomplete:

* There still isn't a way to have any text in your custom widgets (e.g. labels on a graph) - last time I checked anyway.

* The built in text editor widgets have an anorexic API. I wrote a serial port monitoring program and to remove the first line of text from the output window I had to record the lengths of all the lines in a JavaScript array and then remove that number of characters. And it was very slow. And selection was buggy.

* The ID scope rules are weird. Honestly I never fully worked them out. It seems like every ID is accessible from anywhere - even child components can directly access IDs in their parents. You can imagine the kind of spaghetti code that leads to.

Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#68

Post by bkor »

jacobush wrote: post #45
donjoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm missing are some points regarding: - Maintainability: Who will maintain a Qt application once it's deployed? How fast can a Qt application become modified? - Cost for/of developers/development: How easy is it to find good Qt frontend developers/maintainers? - System upgrades: How will HAM upgrade its appliances? I assume he's talking about HAM as BSH (Bosch and Siemens Home Appliances). They're currently hea…

And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. HTML is (in practice) more liberally licensed. (Edit: not GPL, but LGPL. Which is almost as bad for embedded systems as GPL itself is. How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Nightmare. Just pay up. Qt LGPL is (or was) fine for desktop apps pre app stores. Now, not so much.)

> How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field?

Where in the GPL or LGPL is this stated?

Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#69

Post by Const-me »

jacobush wrote: post #45
donjoe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm missing are some points regarding: - Maintainability: Who will maintain a Qt application once it's deployed? How fast can a Qt application become modified? - Cost for/of developers/development: How easy is it to find good Qt frontend developers/maintainers? - System upgrades: How will HAM upgrade its appliances? I assume he's talking about HAM as BSH (Bosch and Siemens Home Appliances). They're currently hea…

And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. HTML is (in practice) more liberally licensed. (Edit: not GPL, but LGPL. Which is almost as bad for embedded systems as GPL itself is. How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Nightmare. Just pay up. Qt LGPL is (or was) fine for desktop apps pre app stores. Now, not so much.)

> 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.

Re: Qt or HTML5? A Million Dollar Question

#70

Post by detaro »

bkor wrote: post #68
jacobush wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And licensing. Qt is LGPL or commercial. HTML is (in practice) more liberally licensed. (Edit: not GPL, but LGPL. Which is almost as bad for embedded systems as GPL itself is. How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Nightmare. Just pay up. Qt LGPL is (or was) fine for desktop apps pre app stores. Now, not so much.)

> How do you let the user relink Qt or replace Qt with their own version, in the field? Where in the GPL or LGPL is this stated?

GPLv3 section 6 requires you to to provide instructions that allow the user to replace GPL-licensed software on a device, unless there is no upgrade functionality at all (so if you have an upgrade mechanism, you must open it to the user, if you burn the software to unchangeable ROM you don't have to replace that with writeable memory just to enable user replacement)

LPGLv3 section 4 modifies this for LGPL-licensed software, requiring you to allow replacement of LGPL-licensed parts of software under the same mechanisms.

This is commonly known as the "anti-tivoisation provisions".

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