Should I base my Embedded Linux product on Qt?

Question

My company is developing a medical product. One of the components is a pda-like platform that will run embedded linux.

We were considering Qt as the UI framework but found out that Qt is a lot more than that (we are not familiar with Qt).

In general, the device needs to do the following: 1. Receive measurements over USB HID from another device (USB HID is used for convenience). 2. Process the measurements. 3. Store them in a database. 4. Interact with the user using the device's touch screen lcd. 5. Communicate (wi-fi, tcp-ip) with a central management station that collects the data and configures the device. 6. Include a web server to allow accessing the device via a browser.

We intend to program in C++.

My questions are: 1. Is that a good choice for such a device? 2. Assuming we choose Qt, how do we build our product? - Do we use Qt just as a GUI framework and write the application code in a separate process (passing messages between Qt and the application process)? - Do we write the entire application inside Qt, using all of the services the tool has to offer? - Another approach?

Answer 1

1, To answer the question if it's a good choice one needs to know what other choices you have. What other possibilities do you have to write GUI for this embedded linux system? Do they support C++? Are they any good? Are they likely to be portable to any other devices you might want to write for in the future?

Another reason to choose QT is that it has an emulator for some embedded devices so atleast for the GUI front end you might be able do to most of the development on your normal windows machine.

2, Yes, you build a complete application with QT. There is no need to divide into more than one process. The GUI part is integrated seamlessly with the rest of your functionality. There is nothing that will prevent you from making whatever calls you make to communicate with the USB.