Bachelor Thesis - Computer Graphics Group

• MFC [16] is for Windows only. It has a long tradition and vast amounts
of documentation. Nevertheless, it is not included with the freely available
Express edition of Visual Studio. It is quite heavyweight, large
amounts of code have to be written in order to create the user interface.
The recently released Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack would make MFC
a bit more attractive, if released before design process has started
• WTL [37] is a lightweight alternative to the MFC, an extension of the
Active Template Library (ATL). It is an open-source project from Microsoft,
however without any technical support. There is practically no
documentation available, only some tutorials and applications written
in WTL can be found on the Internet. The whole library consists of
header files only. The application does not have to be linked to any
library. However, heavy use of templates slows down the compilation
significantly. Like MFC, this framework is for Windows only
• Windows Forms [36] and the .NET Framework offer a comprehensive
set of cleanly designed classes covering all aspects of application
programming. Visual Studio supports development of Windows Forms
applications natively. The System.Drawing provides rich painting abilities,
but the underlying GDI+ library, itself a wrapper of the GDI, is
rather slow. System.Xml provides excellent XML support, etc. The
biggest disadvantage and the main reason for refusing this toolkit is the
dependency on the .NET Framework and managed code. The consequences
are increased memory usage and slower performance, especially
on lower-end computers
The Qt toolkit [32, 33], which has the most benefits has been chosen:
• Qt is cross-platform and free for non-commercial use
• modern C++ features including templates, exceptions, precompiled headers
are supported
• Qt is modular; the application is only linked with the modules providing
the necessary functionality. Many modules with consistent interfaces are
provided beyond the widget system. For example, comprehensive XML
support, network connectivity, database access, HTML engine (WebKit),
scripting and multimedia playback (Phonon) modules are included
• Qt mimics the native platform look on Windows and Mac OS X as closely
as possible by using the platforms’ default theme rendering APIs. The
Linux version renders the controls on its own, as there are no native
system widgets
• Qt extends the limited C++ object model [29] by using a custom preprocessor
tool invoked automatically by the build system
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