On Friday 10 July 2009, Crisses wrote:
> On Jul 9, 2009, at 7:01 PM, Chris Knadle wrote:
> > Anything 3D would be troublesome for a web app, anything that
> > needs speed or high performance, heavy computation... etc. I
> > also personally don't like the paradigm of "everything in the
> > browser" -- although I did carefully consider it when I started
> > to write the RF data plotting application I'm currently writing,
> > because writing for the browser does have immediate
> > cross-platform benefits.
>
> Another immediate benefit that may or may not apply to an
> application such as your RF data plotting app is immediate
> internetworkability. I have a couple virtual assistants, and
> Google Calendar & Google Docs, Freshbooks, Clarity Accounting (or a
> similar online accounting system), Sugar (or another online CRM)
> etc. become exceedingly important when your office support staff
> aren't on premises. Way back when you were trying to do consulting
> work from 100 miles away from your office, internet apps would have
> probably come in handy.
It's a stand-alone app for a good reason -- it needs to be a viable
option in secure environments, like "closed areas". Military RF data
is invariably considered to be secret, so it cannot be transmitted
over the 'net to be used in a web app. And for "closed areas", or
any computers containing any secret data, no connection to the 'net is
possible -- sometimes there's limited access to a local LAN within an
area, but that's it.
Even so, I could have started writing this app as a local browser app.
It just so happens that I know C, C++, and Qt far better than my
paultry skills in web-based languages, and I couldn't see a good
reason why a local browser app would be better suited than C++ and Qt
was for this. One of the main issues I needed to consider in terms of
performance was graphics double-buffering. In Qt4, graphic plotting
is automatically double-buffered, so the final image is displayed only
after drawing to the plot device is complete, which removes flicker
after window resizing and other redraw events. I'm also making a lot
of use of SVG vector images to allow unpixelated zooming and resizing,
which is another area I wouldn't know how to handle properly in a web
app. It might be possible, but I don't know how I'd go about it,
whereas this is another feature native to Qt4. Architecutre
portability is something I'm keeping in mind, so this app should work
across Windows, Linux, Mac, and Unix.
For those of you that noticed me walking around with a printout with a
big table of numbers on it while I was thinking about a data structure
to hold it, that was an example RF file [Touchstone 1.0, specifically]
that this program now can read. This is what that format looks like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattering_parameters#List_format
I'll blabber more about what the application is for and what it does
when it shows some visible results. :-P The work is going well, but
it's taking more time and effort than I had anticipated.
> You're technical enough to remote in to a
> work computer, but not everyone is -- and I don't even WANT my VAs
> to log into my computer and use it -- although that's one of the
> options we had. The ability to work on the same files in the same
> application at the same time is a godsend when my office assistants
> are 30-1000 miles away.
The only remote work I was doing at the time was CAD related in doing
PC board layouts, which is an area that I wouldn't want to attempt
over a remote connection.
-- Chris
--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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