Architectural decision : QT or Eclipse Platform ?

Question

We are in the process of designing a tool to be used with HDEM(High Definition Electron Microscope).We get stacks of 2D images from HDEM and first step is 'detecting borders' on the sections.After detecting edges of 2D slices ,next step is construct the 3D model using these 2D slices.

This 'border detecting' algorithm(s) is/are implemented by one of professor and he has used and suggests to use C.(to gain high performance and probably will parallelise in future) We have to develop comprehensive UI ,3D viewer ,2D editor...etc and use this algorithm.

Application should support usual features like project save/open.Undo,Redo...etc

Our technology decisions are:

A) Build entire platform from the scratch using QT.

B) Use Eclipse Platform

Our concerns are,

if we choose A) we can easily integrate the 'border detecting' algorithm(s) because the development environment is C/C++ But we have to implement the basic features from the scratch.

If we choose B) we get basic features from the Eclipse platform , but integrating C libraries going to be a tedious task.

Any suggestions on this?

Answer 1

I'd go for Qt any time:-)

If you need a IDE framework to build your project on you might want to consider Qt together with Qt creator. The latter is a really nice IDE to develop with and can be extended with custom plugins, pretty much like eclipse.

Answer 2

If you need performance and a well-controlled process I'd suggest going the Qt way.

Qt has a well documented class library that should make implementation of basic features fairly easy and intuitive. It also has OpenGL support for 3D and good 2D editing capabilities.

I've recently built a monitoring application with a custom UI and it was fairly easy once you get past the basic concepts behind the framework.