6 ms·

This is great, but I do wonder if the lifespan of Qt and other frontend frameworks is somewhat limited. UI development seems to be converging more and more on t

• TomMarius 8y ago
  With WebAssembly and other recent developments, I think that the opposite is going to happen in the future. We are (hopefully) going to have native (online) apps.
  • vetinari 8y ago
    What makes you think so? WebAssembly is about making it possible to compile from any language into subset of javascript (which is well JIT-table), it doesn't say nothing about neither which layout/gfx engine the apps will use, nor about any ISA. Many want the bindings to DOM, actually.
    • solarkraft 8y ago
      WebAssembly will make it simpler to port non-DOM UI libraries to the web, which probably some people will use - though the DOM based UI libraries are already quite strong.
    • pjmlp 8y ago
      WebAssembly + Canvas/WebGL. http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/22/qt-for-webassembly-examples/ http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/22/qt-for-webassembly-example... http://platform.uno/Playground/index.html http://platform.uno/Playground/index.html
      • bpicolo 8y ago
        Would a less-specialized rendering engine not be even less performant if trying to make web-app like things?
        • pjmlp 8y ago
          What web-app like? If browser vendors don't change course in regards to WebAssembly's roadmap, Flash and Applets are back, just give it one more year to mature the eco-system.
          • bpicolo 8y ago
            Seems unlikely. Developers are already using the DOM model outside of the browser entirely a'la Electron because in modern times it's such a productive and accessible development environment. I can't imagine we'd try to bring back the pain of Flash. What we have now is drastically more portable and a delight to use compared to that era.
    • TomMarius 8y ago
      Instead of bindings to DOM, you can offer bindings to native API - Webassembly makes it safe. Another approach is running your app on webgl. WASM is not a subset of JavaScript at all, it has similar modularization, but that's about it.
  • chaz6 8y ago
    I hope you are right; I see WebAssembly (or a potential successor) to be the missing gap in the ecosystem, which Java (as well as some previous small attempts) attempted to be. Since javascript (or ecmascript for the purists) now runs server-side (e.g. node.js), there's no reason wasm could not run everywhere.
  • kbutler 8y ago
    I am also interested in this, but I'm concerned about the accessibility aspects. Native Qt can be accessible. Web apps can be accessible. Can Native Qt on web assembly be accessible? How would that work cross-platform?
    • TomMarius 8y ago
      There are 3 approaches: - Web apps (using DOM like usual) - Native Qt and a WASM runtime that has bindings directly to the native library (basically PyQt, but WASM instead of Python) - Qt apps in canvas (webgl) The first two are definitely accessible (by default or very easily). The last one not so much, but it's still possible, and project like Qt should have enough resources to pull it off. The second approach should be the most performant.