Question

Coming from C++ & MFC background, is there any better (maintainability/customization) platform in developing application GUI ?

We are developing industrial applications (machine vision), where :
-Performance-critical (mostly image processing in CPU atm, but GPU is up next)
-Low level hardware interfacing (inhouse PCI device, frame grabber, motion card)
-Real-time data visualization (images / statistical graph)
-Future roadmap includes networkability for distributed processing and remote access.

Cross-platform will not be important for us since the system runs in controlled-environment (customer only cares whether the system runs and they got their output).

There are also concerns on migration cost (3rd party dependencies, training cost for developers and service personnel)

Edit
Clarification on the “image processing” mentioned above:
I’m referring to “picture” (2D information in matrix format) rather than graphic (commonly 3D vectorized). Currently we uses 3rd party imaging library (for spatial domain processing like segmentation, OCR/OCV, morphology, pattern match) and incorporate our result logic.

Answer 1

What I had did before when developing a C++ scientific application is that, it will develop it completely under console based application. The console based application will able accept various type of command from user keyboard, and perform action accordingly. For example :

image_processor > load input.png
image_processor > save out.png

The good thing on this is, I can 100% in concentrating my algorithm design, without worry much on how to fit into the GUI framework. Either they are MFC or QT.

At the end of day, instead of taking input from keyboard input stream, I will just simply hook my console based application’s STDIN, to the GUI application communication channel. My GUI application will then string based command, to talk and receive feedback from the console application.

Guess what I use to develop the GUI? Java Swing 🙂

I guess I am taking Unix people approach. See what Joel says :

Suppose you take a Unix programmer and a Windows programmer and give them each the task of creating the same end-user application. The Unix programmer will create a command-line or text-driven core and occasionally, as an afterthought, build a GUI which drives that core. This way the main operations of the application will be available to other programmers who can invoke the program on the command line and read the results as text. The Windows programmer will tend to start with a GUI, and occasionally, as an afterthought, add a scripting language which can automate the operation of the GUI interface.

I realize by taking Windows approach, you will end up with a more user friendly application. However, if your main concern is to get the sophisticated algorithm written well and GUI is the secondary, I would suggest that you go for Unix approach.