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

[Mike Jackson]

André Pönitz wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 04:03:56PM +0100, Jason H wrote:
>>> 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.
>
> Definitely not true for the kind aof applications the OP describes.
>
> Anndre'

After reviewing the responses and doing some more research online we 
decided to stick with the traditional QWidgets for our desktop app but 
get away from the QGraphics* classes and replace that older code with 
code based on QOpenGlWidget so we can get accelerated 2D rendering.

Thanks all for your responses and suggestions.

Mike Jackson