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please bear in mind I am not a GUI programmer.

As the title says but to give a little more details:

I have a very large C++ application which I would like to upgrade the GUI for. There is an SDK that we can attach a new GUI onto and I would like to make it look as modern and fancy as possible, I have been advised to use HTML5 for this.

We build and link the project using in house bat files which I have hooked into MSDEV to save me going back to the console every time I want to build the project. I also use MSDEV to attach to the programs when they are running to debug.

Can I also do this in QT?

(I cannot download it and try as I need to have a business case for downloading new software and investigation is a hard one to get approved).

If I did this in QT, could I then use Webkit to create a HTML 5 front end or is there more work required?

Stefan
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  • If you are going to use Qt anyway, then use the GUI part of that library for the GUI. It's probably more work to implement it as a `QTWebKit` widget than using the library's own widget system. – Some programmer dude Sep 25 '12 at 10:14
  • Is that easy to hook into the SDK of my existing application (please bear in mind that my application has hundreds of DLLs spread across an in house format). Also, does the QT GUI look modern? Looking modern is the major requirement at the moment! – Stefan Sep 25 '12 at 10:17
  • "does the QT GUI look modern?" It looks like whatever you want it to, but defaults to mimicking the OS. Also, you have been tasked with researching a software architecture, but your management won't let you download possible candidates!? – cmannett85 Sep 25 '12 at 10:33
  • Sorry, poor choice of words. I should have phrased that as 'do the standard wigets look modern?', the UI tool we have at the moment looks very old hence the need for a vamp - also is it easy to hook the wigets into an existing SDK? Unfortunately this task (from a company point of view) is low on the food chain so it is difficult to get exceptions passed the IT controllers. It will probably happen within a few days/weeks but I have to play the hand I am dealt. – Stefan Sep 25 '12 at 10:39

1 Answers1

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What Does Qt Look Like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVQ0S-b5lDs

The demo program that comes with the Qt SDK shows off quite a bit of what you can do with the GUI programming. You can build almost anything you can imagine!

It looks native to the operating system it is running on, Windows 7, Mac OSX, Ubuntu, etc.

I believe most of the Linux KDE GUI is now done through Qt.

Running Console Applications

If you need to run things from the console, you can manage that in C++ pretty easily.

system("run_this.bat");

In Qt, if you don't need to see the console window, you can run most things as a QProcess.

There are ways to hook the stderr and see what is going on as well.

HTML 5

Something written in HTML 5 shows up in a browser, and there are a number of slick graphics and effects that can be used with it, but using the QtWebKit, will only ensure that the webpage you are rendering looks the same on every computer you run it on. Most modern browsers are becoming HTML 5 compliant, so relying on the HTML 5 out of Qt shouldn't be necessary.

W3Schools gives a pretty good introduction into what HTML 5 adds to websites:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_intro.asp

Using HTML 5 or C++

Writing a web application that uses HTML 5 versus writing a Desktop application that uses a native GUI are two very different things.

Running files on a local machine is pretty sandboxed when going through a browser with HTML 5. If you are okay with running something remotely on your own server, then it shouldn't be too bad.

phyatt
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