Presenting Qt

jorj · wrote on 18 Mar 2011, 14:27

The company I work at currently uses a (really old copy of) wxWidgets for their app, I have a chance to present some Qt to them, with the aim of if it is amazing enough they will want to switch, any advice on what to say?

Pro points I was thinking of mentioning, because these apply directly to us are:

Scripting built in
Meta object system and signals and slots

Does anyone have any more ideas of why a company would really like to switch to Qt (say development time, application performance etc), maybe some facts and figures?

Or any specific pro points over wx? or already made presentation material about switching or using Qt in a commercial environment?

giesbert · wrote on 18 Mar 2011, 14:35

One pro point for companies might be: there is commercial support (depends on the company if it's pro or not, for us, it is)#

When we made that decission, also the functionality (not only UI!) as it's also a platform abstraction layer (network, etc.)

mgran · wrote on 18 Mar 2011, 15:12

Check out http://qt.nokia.com/developer/learning/online/training

In the "Qt Essentials - Widget Edition" and "Qt Essentials - Qt Quick Edition" section there are introduction material you can use for the basics - depending on your needs.

And also here, material aimed at those teaching Qt:

http://qt.nokia.com/services-partners/qt-in-education/qt-in-education-course-material

jorj · wrote on 18 Mar 2011, 15:16

@gerolf: the commercial support may suit us, i'm not sure... however we already have quite a large codebase so not so much the network stuff...

@mariusg: that looks great, thanks!

sfabry · wrote on 18 Mar 2011, 16:18

Unless wxwidgets improved a lot last years, when I had to start with wx or Qt, I remember big difficulty to work with wx because of their lack of documentation, what is greatfull with the Qt kit is their amazing docs that help you a lot going faster to code what you need !

ZapB · wrote on 18 Mar 2011, 16:34

Best documentation
Signals/slots
Intuitive API
Other non-gui components e.g. Xml handling, database support, state machine
Excellent built-in scripting (trivial to expose QObjects)
QML
OpenGL support
Excellent community support

We might be able to give you some more directly relevant specifics if you tell us a little about the application that would be ported.

jorj · wrote on 18 Mar 2011, 17:16

wx documentation is thoroughly lacking. i really appreciate that in Qt now.

baysmith · wrote on 19 Mar 2011, 03:34

While it doesn't speak to the technical attributes of the two frameworks, the "job trends":http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Qt,+wxWidgets is interesting, and gives some indication about the amount of use and growth of Qt relative to wxWidgets. Sometimes companies want reassurance of the safety of a choice more than the technical analysis.