Both Facebook and Netflix implemented their eponymous apps with Web. Despite spending millions of dollars, neither of them could achieve an iPhone-like user experience (60 frames per second and less than 100ms response to user inputs) on anything less powerful than a system-on-chip (SoC) with four ARM Cortex-A9 cores.
In contrast, numerous products like infotainment systems, in-flight entertainment systems, harvester terminals and home appliances prove that you can achieve an iPhone-like user experience (UX) on single-core Cortex-A8 SoCs. Our above-mentioned manufacturer HAM Inc. (renamed for the sake of confidentiality) verified these results by building both a Web and Qt prototype.
In this white paper, Burkhard Stubert explains how he could save one of the world's largest home appliance manufacturers millions of Euros by choosing Qt over HTML. The secret? Qt scales down to lower-end hardware a lot better, without sacrificing user experience.
With a five times smaller footprint, four to eight times lower RAM requirements and a more efficient rendering flow than HTML, Qt provides faster start-up times and maintains the cherished 60fps and 100ms response time, where HTML would struggle. The calculations show that being able to just downgrade your SoC by just one tier like this, Qt can reduce your hardware costs by over 53%.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Friday February 23 2018, @11:38AM (3 children)
But multiplataform development is easier with Javascript than with any compiled language.
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Friday February 23 2018, @02:11PM (1 child)
Qt is actually pretty easy to work in. Try it before you knock it. It's a bit more complicated to write, but you miss a lot of the "write once, debug forever/everywhere" issue that Java & Javascript give you. It's a net gain from a development time perspective. The runtimes are a lot more consistent across platforms than web browsers are.
More importantly though, this article isn't even talking about multi-platform. The Qt example is talking about writing an app to target a specific piece of hardware. You need to pay for higher specs to run the same app more slowly when you write it in HTML/Javascript compared to a native GUI system.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday February 23 2018, @06:52PM
Lester does have a point though - it's a very different skill-set. If I had a team of passable web-devs accustomed to writing passable JavaScript, and with no knowledge or understanding of C/C++, I wouldn't want them set loose.
Maybe QtQuick would help there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @03:44PM
JS isn't even consistent between browsers and the "standard" changes on a daily basis. Please try again.