Application GUI development platform

Coming from C++ & MFC background, is there any better (maintainability/cus开发者_运维百科tomization) platform in developing application GUI ?

We are developing industrial applications (machine vision), where :

-Performance-critical (mostly image processing in CPU atm, but GPU is up next)

-Low level hardware interfacing (inhouse PCI device, frame grabber, motion card)

-Real-time data visualization (images / statistical graph)

-Future roadmap includes networkability for distributed processing and remote access.

Cross-platform will not be important for us since the system runs in controlled-environment (customer only cares whether the system runs and they got their output).

There are also concerns on migration cost (3rd party dependencies, training cost for developers and service personnel)

Edit

Clarification on the "image processing" mentioned above:

I'm referring to "picture" (2D information in matrix format) rather than graphic (commonly 3D vectorized). Currently we uses 3rd party imaging library (for spatial domain processing like segmentation, OCR/OCV, morphology, pattern match) and incorporate our result logic.

If you need performance-critical graphics processing, then C++/DirectX or C++/OpenGL are your best bets, hands down. C++/DirectX is arguably the more maintainable of the two.

That said... depending on the actual processing you're doing, you might consider moving portions of your UI to a more maintainable platform. The .NET framework / WPF can do some pretty amazing things, and with good implementation of patterns like MVVM and can be amazingly maintainable. Ditto the networking side; WCF abstracts a lot of common protocols away from the code, making for cleaner, more maintainable networking code. You can even write your translation layer between your unmanaged processing and your managed layer in C++/CLI.

That said, it's all very subjective. I can't tell enough from your bullet points to make a good judgement on whether or not you can offload some or even all of your processing to .NET/C#. It's worth considering, but my gut tells me that it's probably not your best bet.

As a fan of Qt I would be remiss not to mention it.

• Although cross-platform is not one of your criteria, it is a nice bonus.
• Qt also has good video hardware support through OpenGL (I'm not sure that it will help with capture hardware though).
• It is open-source so you can get your hands as dirty as you like.
• It is highly customizable.
• It is actively developed and has a large community.
• MFC programmers should not have much trouble coming up to speed.

You should also read through some of these questions and answers:

Good C++ GUI library for Windows https://stackoverflow.com/questions/610/gui-programming-apis

What I had did before when developing a C++ scientific application is that, it will develop it completely under console based application. The console based application will able accept various type of command from user keyboard, and perform action accordingly. For example :

image_processor > load input.png
image_processor > save out.png

The good thing on this is, I can 100% in concentrating my algorithm design, without worry much on how to fit into the GUI framework. Either they are MFC or QT.

At the end of day, instead of taking input from keyboard input stream, I will just simply hook my console based application's STDIN, to the GUI application communication channel. My GUI application will then string based command, to talk and receive feedback from the console application.

Guess what I use to develop the GUI? Java Swing :)

I guess I am taking Unix people approach. See what Joel says :

Suppose you take a Unix programmer and a Windows programmer and give them each the task of creating the same end-user application. The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface.

I realize by taking Windows approach, you will end up with a more user friendly application. However, if your main concern is to get the sophisticated algorithm written well and GUI is the secondary, I would suggest that you go for Unix approach.