[LAD] Looking for an introduction to rt programming with a gui

Olivier Guilyardi list at samalyse.com
Thu May 20 16:30:15 UTC 2010


Hi Nathanael,

On 05/20/2010 01:35 PM, Nathanael Anderson wrote:
> I've written some small c/c++ programs for my own use that were alsa
> midi based. I found a very low entry barrier to getting started writing
> console apps with alsa midi. I'd like to work on something a little
> larger scale, and include jack midi with a gui to configure options, but
> have no idea where to start.
> 
> I'd ideally like to use a loolkit that provides skinable interfaces, and
> I'm familiar with html/css layout, so something where I can build the
> gui from a layout file would be nice. If it can handle threading issues
> for me (rt worker and non rt gui) even better.

Qt is really great. I also highly recommend that you look at Qt Creator which is
included in the SDK. Although I'm a long time Vim user, I really found this IDE
to be extremely simple and efficient. The GUI interface designer is also
directly integrated into Qt Creator.

Threading is really intuitive in Qt to me. Just extend QThread and implement
run(), done (well, almost ;).

About "skinning":
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/stylesheet.html
"The concepts, terminology, and syntax of Qt Style Sheets are heavily inspired
by HTML Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) but adapted to the world of widgets"

> What choices do I have for tools to use, and what pro's/con's are
> attached to them. From what i've read so far qt seems like it might be a
> good choice, aside from the high entry barrier of learning how to do
> everything the qt way.

Gabriel already mentioned some pros and cons, but if that matters to you, Qt
provides quite amazing portability to other operating systems. I used it to
develop a win32 app for one my of customer, almost only working on Linux.

I really don't think there's such a high entry to the learning curve. It's all
plain C++, and the specific signal/slot syntax is intuitive.

Qt is not such a world apart IMO. I've used Gtk a lot, and I really like it too,
but I was amazed about how productive I got as soon as I started using Qt.

Hope that helps,

--
  Olivier




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