[Interest] Qt is good because...

[Sivan Greenberg]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 12:09 AM, Quim Gil <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:
>
>> - C++
>
> Please help explaining this further (as I'm not a C++ developer myself).
> Also we need to explain this next to QML, Javascript and HTML5 -
> otherwise we risk keeping the perception that Qt is C++ only and scaring
> away many mobile developers more familiar HTML / CSS / Javascript that
> would fit perfectly in the context of Qt Quick & Qt WebKit.


Right, in my POV, C++ "feature" of Qt should be a bit less emphasized
away. As it might feel too tall a hill to climb for new developers,
and is the reason why projects like PhoneGap and related gain more and
more popularity and decision makers move more and more towards the
scripted, HTML5/JavaScript paradigm (there's also abundant talent).

On the other hand, Qt is interesting as of its use of C++ employing
advanced C++ concepts and allows for unprecedented power when you go
the low level C++ path...

>
>> - signals&  slots (aka observer pattern)
>
> Help explaining the beauty of this functionality compared to other
> toolkits is appreciated. Again, how to explain how great this is to a
> newcomer?
>

Personally speaking, I never really got the difference between Signals
& Slots and Callbacks in CTK+ ? But perhaps this is the same pattern
implemented differently?

>> - cross-platform GUI toolkit
>
> This one is now addressed at "Cross platform = multiple targets & user
> sectors"

There are now a large number of those. We need to emphasis other
points in Qt's cross platformness, like easy deployment (the runtime
uses bare bone components most systems likely to have; c/c++ compiler,
binutils or similar as opposed to Java that is usually available by
intended installation) and testing, best integrated development
environment ever seen on earth for both desktop and mobile/ embedded
targets (Qt Creator) , running natively as opposed to other platforms
(most of qt stuff compiles to native code rather than a VM / language
runtime), abundant documentation integrated into the IDE, endless
examples to get you started, best community ever in such a project,
Nokia as the main supporter.. what else? ;)


Qt SDK is the only competitor in my view to Microsoft's integrated
development offering, which can be translated to "Enterprise grade
ready integrated development offering" or so..

-Sivan