wxWidgets vs. Qt

Money Manager Ex Development related posts for both Android and Desktop

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dodgyrabbit
New MMEX User
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Dec 01, 2008 4:54 pm

wxWidgets vs. Qt

Post by dodgyrabbit »

Hi,

For some reason I can't post in the Development Forum so I'm posting here. Is that Forum reserved?

I've been using MoneyManagerEx for a while and made a small contribution some time ago. I've also been following what others are asking for. This lead me to do some reading about wxWidgets and other frameworks that allow us to develop platform independent software.

At face value, it seems something like "Qt" would allow us to develop a richer UI. For example, it has better support for rendering HTML - in fact - it includes WebKit and will allow much more interactive reports etc. The wxWidgets HTML rendering implementation is very simple and doesn't support CSS or many of the good things one can do with HTML that will enhance MoneyManagerEx reports.

Not knowing the history of MoneyManagerEx myself, I can imagine there might be good reasons for not using Qt but perhaps we can open that discussion? Maybe licensing, complexity or perhaps just personal preference was the main motivation?

Pieter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit)
madhan
Site Admin
Posts: 99
Joined: Sun Nov 30, 2008 8:06 pm

Re: wxWidgets vs. Qt

Post by madhan »

Sorry, I screwed up forum permissions and that's why you weren't able to post. Please let me know if you still encounter issues. I moved this post to Development.

Just as a bit of history, before MMEX was written, there was a version in .NET which was a small hobby project I released which became quite popular. Since I never wrote for scalability (records were stored in XML :-), I quickly decided to rewrite it. At that time when I did my survey, it was QT vs wxWidgets. I wasn't sure what license MMEX was going to be in, but wxWidgets was wide open in terms of licensing flexibility, while QT was free only if you are doing open source projects. My testing showed I could do what I wanted in wxWidgets without too much fuss and I just went the wxWidgets way. I guess if there is one single reason, it probably is licensing of QT. But that is all moot now, MMEX is open source and could perfectly work with QT licensing without issues.

There is a plan for future direction of MMEX that is closely tied with Tonido (the product we are working in our startup), of course, MMEX will be still open source. But that will be atleast 6 months out before something happens there. That's also the other reason, MMEX dev is moving slower (as I am sure you noticed).

In any case, I would be interested to hear about other ideas regarding MMEX development.
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