Re: It is time for me to take a decision.
Re: It is time for me to take a decision.
- Subject: Re: It is time for me to take a decision.
- From: "Simson L. Garfinkel" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 10:41:10 -0400
I have been developing with NeXTSTEP/Cocoa on and off for approximately 11
years. I've been developing with Qt for approximately 2 years.
Here are the main issues:
* Qt is multi-platform. You can run the same program, with just a recompile,
on Windows, UNIX, and Cocoa.
* Qt is C++; Cocoa is Objective-C. (I prefer Objective-C)
* Qt has a "meta object" system that implements something that is similar to
Objective-C's run-time message resolution.
* Qt has a "slot and signal" system that is somewhat similar to Cocoa's
sender/target paradigm.
* Qt does not have a clean View/Window system. It throws all of the
functionality into its QWidget class.
* Qt does not have scaled coordinate systems for events, just for drawing.
This is a super-pain if you want to handle mouse events in a scaled view.
* Qt has an Interface Builder/ Designer, but real Qt programmers don't use
it much. With Cocoa you can build interfaces without Interface Builder, but
real programmers don't.
Overall, Qt is remarkably similar to Cocoa. It's so similar, in fact, that I
am able to answer Qt questions from my knowledge of NeXTSTEP. However, this
similarity was entirely accidental. Qt diverges form NeXTSTEP in some
critical ways, and every time it diverges, NeXTSTEP/Cocoa's approach is
fundamentally better.
If you are going to confine your development to Mac-based computers, I would
use Objective-C/Cocoa. But if you want the code to run on all platforms, I
would use Qt.
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