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For this particular app, yes. However, more more complex UIs I think that Electron has some benefits that QT does not. The UI tools available to web application

by throwaway2016a 10y ago

For this particular app, yes. However, more more complex UIs I think that Electron has some benefits that QT does not. The UI tools available to web applications is miles ahead of desktop. The benefit the technology set gives us in productivity will hopefully produce higher quality apps at lower costs. FOr example, I'm considering it for a big data front-end because of all the high quality graphing libraries and reactive template libraries available for web applications. Plus I don't need to retrain the team. This app it is kind of overkill, though.

problems 10y ago
> The UI tools available to web applications is miles ahead of desktop. That's a ridiculous statement. Web UIs are pretty awful, unpredictable, confusing and non-standard compared to desktop ones. Not only that but they're hard to develop, you have to jump through hoops of CSS hacks to make things behave in a sort-of-desktop-like fashion. There are many high quality graphing libraries available on desktop apps (Qwt, QCustomPlot, DevExpress to name a few I've worked with). The training thing you talk about is true though, if your team has more experience on the web, then retraining them is wasted effort I suppose. Depends on your idea of quality result though.
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  > Web UIs are pretty awful, unpredictable, confusing and non-standard compared to desktop ones. Not only that but they're hard to develop, you have to jump through hoops of CSS hacks to make things behave in a sort-of-desktop-like fashion. I disagree almost completely with this. I haven't had to use a CSS "hack" in ages. And I think the "hard to develop" part is a product of experience. Having been in the web world for a while I find no difficult in it at all. Especially when using one of the many CSS frameworks out there. Although I will give you that on second read, my statement is a bit ridiculous because I said "tools" and desktop does have better drag and drop tools for UI. What I should have said is "capabilities" Was there something that can be done on the desktop you had in mind that is particular difficult in web?
pjmlp 10y ago
> The UI tools available to web applications is miles ahead of desktop. Such as? Doing native UIs since MS-DOS and Amiga, with enough web experience not to see how it is better than the RAD tooling of the 90's or declarative UIs like XAML. Where is Blend for web UIs or Delphi style app development?
- throwaway2016a 10y ago
  > Such as? Having developed in all of those (Borland C++ Builder which is the same as Delphi except not OO Pascal, QT, and web)... The amount of power CSS gives you over the precise look of the app at different aspect ratios gives an awesome amount of control over what the app looks like on any screen size. Also, things like wrapping of elements from one line to another work very well in CSS/HTML, especially when dealing with interactive rich text. For example, in some UI libraries (iOS comes to mind) making a line of text with a clickable image inside of it that wraps when the text gets too long is frustratingly difficult but in HTML it is a piece of cake. With that said, the rich text editing choses for web are much easier to work with and more robust (IMHO) than the desktop equivalents. Not to mention OpenGL rendering, vector graphics, loading of assets from the network are all built-in. All of which can certainly be done from a desktop environment but the tools to do so are not as mature. .NET makes a lot of strides in this direction. But if you're going to include the .NET runtime with your distribution it will be almost as large as Electron apps. Then there are animations which are easy in web technologies. And which UX designers are starting to realize is an important aspect of good user experiences. Can all of this be done in QT? Absolutely. But all of it is out-of-the-box with web. As far as the RAD tools from the 90s? Not even close. Albeit Blend is nice. But tools like that do exist for web, just not for desktop UI. I'm sure if web tech becomes more common in desktop UI the tools will come.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    OpenGL rendering that achieves single digit FPS on my mobile devices that don't have have issue running OpenGL ES 3.x games? Or playing with CSS magic trying to figure out the incantation that will make it hardware accelerate the GUI in a portable way across all browsers? Web animations are a poor cousin of native animation engines like iOS, Android,UWP, MacOS, JavaFX. Electron was already done in 90's and it didn't take the world, it was called MSHTML. So what wonderful tool for web development does match Blend?

problems 10y ago

> The UI tools available to web applications is miles ahead of desktop. That's a ridiculous statement. Web UIs are pretty awful, unpredictable, confusing and non-standard compared to desktop ones. Not only that but they're hard to develop, you have to jump through hoops of CSS hacks to make things behave in a sort-of-desktop-like fashion. There are many high quality graphing libraries available on desktop apps (Qwt, QCustomPlot, DevExpress to name a few I've worked with). The training thing you talk about is true though, if your team has more experience on the web, then retraining them is wasted effort I suppose. Depends on your idea of quality result though.

throwaway2016a 10y ago
> Web UIs are pretty awful, unpredictable, confusing and non-standard compared to desktop ones. Not only that but they're hard to develop, you have to jump through hoops of CSS hacks to make things behave in a sort-of-desktop-like fashion. I disagree almost completely with this. I haven't had to use a CSS "hack" in ages. And I think the "hard to develop" part is a product of experience. Having been in the web world for a while I find no difficult in it at all. Especially when using one of the many CSS frameworks out there. Although I will give you that on second read, my statement is a bit ridiculous because I said "tools" and desktop does have better drag and drop tools for UI. What I should have said is "capabilities" Was there something that can be done on the desktop you had in mind that is particular difficult in web?

pjmlp 10y ago

> The UI tools available to web applications is miles ahead of desktop. Such as? Doing native UIs since MS-DOS and Amiga, with enough web experience not to see how it is better than the RAD tooling of the 90's or declarative UIs like XAML. Where is Blend for web UIs or Delphi style app development?

throwaway2016a 10y ago
> Such as? Having developed in all of those (Borland C++ Builder which is the same as Delphi except not OO Pascal, QT, and web)... The amount of power CSS gives you over the precise look of the app at different aspect ratios gives an awesome amount of control over what the app looks like on any screen size. Also, things like wrapping of elements from one line to another work very well in CSS/HTML, especially when dealing with interactive rich text. For example, in some UI libraries (iOS comes to mind) making a line of text with a clickable image inside of it that wraps when the text gets too long is frustratingly difficult but in HTML it is a piece of cake. With that said, the rich text editing choses for web are much easier to work with and more robust (IMHO) than the desktop equivalents. Not to mention OpenGL rendering, vector graphics, loading of assets from the network are all built-in. All of which can certainly be done from a desktop environment but the tools to do so are not as mature. .NET makes a lot of strides in this direction. But if you're going to include the .NET runtime with your distribution it will be almost as large as Electron apps. Then there are animations which are easy in web technologies. And which UX designers are starting to realize is an important aspect of good user experiences. Can all of this be done in QT? Absolutely. But all of it is out-of-the-box with web. As far as the RAD tools from the 90s? Not even close. Albeit Blend is nice. But tools like that do exist for web, just not for desktop UI. I'm sure if web tech becomes more common in desktop UI the tools will come.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  OpenGL rendering that achieves single digit FPS on my mobile devices that don't have have issue running OpenGL ES 3.x games? Or playing with CSS magic trying to figure out the incantation that will make it hardware accelerate the GUI in a portable way across all browsers? Web animations are a poor cousin of native animation engines like iOS, Android,UWP, MacOS, JavaFX. Electron was already done in 90's and it didn't take the world, it was called MSHTML. So what wonderful tool for web development does match Blend?