[Interest] Which "Widget" technology to use when starting a new desktop app

[Jason H]

> After watching the webinar "The Curse of Choice: An overview of GUI 
> technologies in Qt?"[1] I am even more confused as to what to use for 
> our new desktop app. Here are a few of the background details. The app 
> will be cross platform to desktop systems, not embedded at all. The app 
> will be displaying some "image" data from hdf5 files and performing some 
> "real" time basic image manipulations (gamma corrections, coloring of 
> data) on that data. The app will eventually call out to some existing 
> libraries to perform some long running analysis/simulations. We are 
> currently using Qt 5.6.2 due to its long term maintenance guarantees.
> 
> In the past I have used QGraphics* classes to show images and perform 
> basic zoom, save, compositing functions but the webinar makes it pretty 
> clear NOT to use those classes any more. The webinar seems to push QML 
> and the Qt Quick classes as the way forward for desktop apps. One of the 
> issues that we might have with QML is the need to apply styling to those 
> widgets, none of us are UX/Styling experts by any stretch of the 
> imagination. I took a look at QOpenGLWidget to display/manipulate the 
> images so that we get an accelerated canvas to use. That looked 
> promising in combination with traditional QWidgets.
> 
> I would like to hear other peoples experiences & suggestions as to what 
> they are doing. I don't want to write the app and then have to figure 
> out how to port it to another Qt technology in a year or so after our 
> funding has run out.


The mantra is to use QML. However I would recommend 5.7, since that has the new QtQuickControls 2, which addresses many issues with the original Qt Quick Controls, and has Layouts that you'll recognize.