Qt and WebAssembly Takes Client Development Mainstream to the Web |

Qt has made substantial investment in WebAssembly in recent years. Many developers and observers initially looked at this as a side technology within the domain of prototyping or specialist web components. At Hungry Mile Software, we were motivated to standardize on a rich client application framework for all browser deployment and determined to work with Qt WebAssembly.

Having now successfully completed a number of exclusively Web Assembly projects, we have been delighted and pleasantly surprised by how well the Qt technology works for mainstream business software. The platform provides superior experience for applications that would have been the domain of PHP, Angular or React in years past.

We will demonstrate an online application that has been ported from PHP to Qt WebAssembly. The consumer-based application provides financial planning services and is rich in data capture and user experience. We will show how QML is used here to provide a very effective and productive development environment for highly responsive user interface development which is key for browser-deployed apps. Qt technologies and components such as state machines can be used effectively in web applications which have otherwise been unavailable in bespoke or standard Javascript web frameworks.

In our presentation we will describe some useful experiences around deployment, tips for developer productivity, and highlight some issues to consider including threading. We will also demonstrate how MQTT can be used (even from a browser application!) to provide exceptional usability and experience for online and near online users.

Learn more about Qt: https://qt.io