QT vs MFC

[Issam_Lahlali]

Hi,
I wrote an article to compare QT to MFC, http://www.codeguru.com/article-preview.php/c16281/ , and i'm interested to any feedback to improve this post in order to help developer who try to choose between QT and MFC.


Thanks.

[GCDEF]

I skimmed through it. The English is a little rough. It's kind of hard to tell what you're trying to say in a few spots. I don't believe it's valid to just count the number of public functions on the edit control the way you did, as that doesn't take base class methods into account. A good portion of CEdit's functionality is handled in CWnd, so the comparison doesn't mean anything really.

[Alex F]

Looks like CppDepend product advertising. The problem is that CppDepend doesn't look professional. I am interesting in such kind of products, and found information provided by CppDepend bit confusing.

[Skizmo]

The images you posted actually say nothing. Also, you forgot the biggest QT aspect and that is the fact that it is cross-platform. It runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and a handful of other OS flavors.

[Issam_Lahlali]

for Edit component QT contains more specific methods than CEdit and CWnd contains generic methods for all components.
the goal of this article is to be objective and give advantages and drawbacks of the 2 frameworks.

[Issam_Lahlali]

I think that in conclusion i specify that QT in the ideal if the application must be multiplatform

[GCDEF]

for Edit component QT contains more specific methods than CEdit and CWnd contains generic methods for all components.

That still isn't relevant. Who cares if a given functionality is in the base class or the derived class as long as the functionality exists.

[Issam_Lahlali]

Looks like CppDepend product advertising. The problem is that CppDepend doesn't look professional. I am interesting in such kind of products, and found information provided by CppDepend bit confusing.

CppDepend is not yet finished and if you have any problems about informations provided by CppDepend, could you send me your problems?

Thanks

[Issam_Lahlali]

That still isn't relevant. Who cares if a given functionality is in the base class or the derived class as long as the functionality exists.

that's problem, some interesting functionalities dont exist in CEdit or CWnd like changing background color of CEdit, for that we have to intercept a message and change it, so it's very complicated.

The problem with C++ is that we spend many times in the technical layer due to complexity of frameworks provided, the ideal is to spend more time in business layer.

[VictorN]

I think that in conclusion i specify that QT in the ideal if the application must be multiplatform

Well, for such a "conclusion" no article is needed: since MFC is NOT a multiplatform tool and QT is it, then there is no any other choice for the "ideal" tool!

[Alex F]

CppDepend is not yet finished and if you have any problems about informations provided by CppDepend, could you send me your problems?

Thanks

Well, actually I think that general goal of CppDepend analysis is not clear. For example, there are lot of .NET tools, which give different statistics about running .NET applications. They produce huge number of graphs, tables and logs, but what to do with all this information?
Regarding static C++ code analysis tools, I am interesting in my own code, and not third-party library analysis. Running such tool, I want to detect, for example, such kind of problems:
- Unnecessary virtual destructors, missing virtual destructors.
- Unnecessary implementation code in h-files.
- Class methods which should be static.
- Portability problems.
- 64 bits problems.
- Naming conventions.
- Deadlocks, memory consumption, unused code, potential memory and resource leaks.
- etc.

I think that best static code analysers are Microsoft FxCop for .NET, PreFast and SDV from Microsoft DDK - they really give useful and exact information about my code.
If you are developing static code analyzer, the most difficult part is code parsing. I guess you already did this, and now you can use it to provide some useful information. The question is, what information is really useful?

[OReubens]

Making conclusions on the usefullness of a particular library based on "amount of members in a class" isn't really giving any kind of usefull information.

When I need to make a decision between one library vs another library "amount of functions" isn't even anywhere on the list of things I'm going to watch for.

You could even arguably say that less members is better... it means a smaller library, and fewer useless functions loaded in memory. Functionality is a good measurement, but there's no amount of automated tool that'll give you an answer to that.

[Issam_Lahlali]

Well, actually I think that general goal of CppDepend analysis is not clear.

The major goal of CppDepend is to detect design and architecture problems in a c++ application, it's not focused in implementation problems, so it's not concurent of static analysis tool but provide another view to your projects, for that it provides:

- Informations about coupling between classes and projects.
- detect dependency cycles between projects and namespaces.
- Informations about cohesion of classes.
- provide CQL langage like SQL to query your code.
- you can detect which classes changes fields of another classes directely.

and also propose many metrics to mesure quality of your code:

- cyclomatic complexity.
- Nbr Line of codes.
- Nbr Lines of Comments.
- Naming conventions.
- Nbr of method parameters
- ...

So the goal CppDepend is to have informations to improve the design and architecture of C++ projects, more than imprve the implementation and bug detection , it can be used with other C++ static analysis tool and the goal is not to propose tool to replace FXCop.

[Issam_Lahlali]

Making conclusions on the usefullness of a particular library based on "amount of members in a class" isn't really giving any kind of usefull information.

When I need to make a decision between one library vs another library "amount of functions" isn't even anywhere on the list of things I'm going to watch for.

You could even arguably say that less members is better... it means a smaller library, and fewer useless functions loaded in memory. Functionality is a good measurement, but there's no amount of automated tool that'll give you an answer to that.

the first time when i tried to change the background color of CEdit , i spend many hours to do that, so in this case im not productive, but if CEdit provide a method that change it like QT edit i can focus more in business layer.

In my opinion for a technical framework it's better to have all useful methods for components in order to spend a minimum time in the technical layer.

and about memory it's true for field that can consume lot of memory but for methods it's not the major problem.

I dont know why C++ frameworks are very complicated and not provide an abstraction of technical complexity, however java and dotnet provide better technical framework accesssible for a beginer developer.

[ahoodin]

These forums are not for spam. They are QA for people who need help.

I think the use of these kinds of metrics is exaggerated. Go set up a website
for it and post links in "announcements" or "chit chat" in the future like everyone
else.

Cheers,