Cutelyst 0.2.0 Released: A Web Framework Powered By Qt 5

[dantti]

C++ should get a great and rock solid framework based on the MCV pattern and stop trying to develop websites like a desktop application, which is really different. Even though I think PHP is a horrible language, it has currently the best tools for web development (symfony2, Doctrine2 and twig)

Hi, Cutelyst ain't about writing websites like desktop applications, QtCore and QtNetwork are great modules which don't require any GUI code, Qt is mainly used due to it's very convenient classes, and your HTML can be written with a templating system.

I've written a small FAQ https://gitorious.org/cutelyst/pages/Home

[dantti]

FAQ

Hi all,

since some of you are confused, I wrote this small FAQ to help out sorting out WTF is this project about :P
https://gitorious.org/cutelyst/pages/Home

Best

[pipe13]

Thanks dantii. I had seen your FAQ, and also "yum info'd wt". Wt is much more mature and has way more documentation and examples (yeah, I know). OTOH, Qt is what I'm increasingly basing the rest of my (desktop) apps on. While I cringe at the prospect of writing anything non-trivial in php/javascript, there's also the issue of hosting whatever when its done. But I'll probably look into Cutelyst -- there's some advantage to starting small. Thanks for your effort!

[accumulator]

Hi, Cutelyst ain't about writing websites like desktop applications

I think what gufide means is that this is a Component based framework, which implies an approach to developing web applications similar to desktop applications (UI object trees). A common problem with Component based frameworks is that styling and theming is very hard to keep separated from code (see for instance the addStylingClass calls in the examples). Another is that the definition and structure of the UI elements are defined in code. In Desktop UI frameworks this is often externalized (e.g. think QML for Qt) after years of maturation. A third issue is that in order to process event callbacks on UI objects, the whole object tree needs to be reconstructed on every request, which leads to relatively much overhead.

[dantti]

I think what gufide means is that this is a Component based framework, which implies an approach to developing web applications similar to desktop applications (UI object trees). A common problem with Component based frameworks is that styling and theming is very hard to keep separated from code (see for instance the addStylingClass calls in the examples). Another is that the definition and structure of the UI elements are defined in code. In Desktop UI frameworks this is often externalized (e.g. think QML for Qt) after years of maturation. A third issue is that in order to process event callbacks on UI objects, the whole object tree needs to be reconstructed on every request, which leads to relatively much overhead.

Sure that's what I'm telling Cutelyst is not. One of the reasons I don't like wt and other frameworks is that I don't like the idea of generating HTML from code, I'd rather use a template system. However Cutelyst doesn't even enforce a templating system, you can think of Cutelyst as a nice API for dealing with HTTP protocol, with helper plugins to deal with session cookies (that can be stored anywhere), authentication, authorization and so on, so if you want to use wt to render HTML and Cutelyst to have the processing requests logic that's something possible.

So far I use Grantlee (Django) templating for my websites, the logic to connect to DB and what to pass for the template is done in the C++ code using the nice Qt classes (QtDatabase, QtCore, QtNetwork...).

Best.