[Qt-interest] Are there any disadvantages with OT

[Jeffrey Brendecke]

> "Daniel Price" <daniel.price at fxhome.com> wrote in message
> news:902B548CE71AB640A08C9EDD266A8C88011EA0EC11 at DELOREAN.fx.local...
>
> >> Disagree, Visual Studio has much better designers than Qt Designer,
> >> especially the VB/C# ones.
> >
> > Sure if you're willing to chain yourself to VB.net or C#! The C++
> > experience in VC (MFC/ATL etc) is awful. The designer is based on
> > resources and only has a tiny selection of widgets, no layouts etc.
>
> When you buy a 3rd party component framework, all of its components are
> installed in the Toolbox.  .NET provides TableLayout and FlowLayout (I
> think it's what they are called) which emulate Qt GridLayout and
> Horizontal/VerticalLayout respectively.

Third-party components sound tempting, but, as they mean establishing a 
dependency on a third party, the owner of the application loses much control 
over the application.

Companies get bought out, go out of business, lose interest in a product, and 
with all that goes support of the component upon which one has come to rely.

The problem is more acute with closed-source components. If one is forced to 
upgrade to a new version of an operating system not supported by an orphaned 
component, critical applications can suddenly not be usable. Migrating to a 
new operating system usually is impossible.

And with all the mention of IDEs and visual tools, the accompanying general 
lack of consideration for abstracting dependencies through good design makes 
the problem with external dependencies is made even worse.

My experience with Qt is that effective use of it means understanding it and 
paying attention to good design practices, and one can go a long way in 
creating good, performant, maintainable, extendable, cross-platform, and 
decent-looking applications with the effective set of widgets and classes it 
provides and extending them as needed, alleviating the need for third-party 
components and the problems they bring with them.

Jeffrey Brendecke

Managing Director
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