GCF Application Server
A couple of months back I had visited a customer for making a sales/technology pitch for the use of GCF in developing their software. They had developed a rather extensive visualization application over 10-12 years and they had been intending to move to Qt for quite sometime now. As they were hunting for an application framework based on Qt for building their next generation modular and extensible visualization app; they tumbled upon GCF.
Anyways, during my meeting with them
I figured that they were not really looking for just a port of their existing desktop visualization application to Qt/GCF; but they wanted to have a part of their visualization application on the Web!.
This is where we faced our first road block. We have absolutely no competence on the web and worse we dont know how the 'Web 2.0' apps are developed. So I did my best to convince them that they have sufficient mileage to gain by porting their visualization application to Qt/GCF. I also had to convey to them that we wont be able to offer them anything on the web.
As I returned to my office - I started getting a feeling that they wont even consider us if dont propose a plan for them for the web as well.
That's when we started thinking - 'How do we get Qt, GCF and the Web' together. We started reading up some material about JavaScript and AJAX. We figured that they are not all complicated. Then we looked at GCF and said -
'Hey we already have a neat Interprocess Communication stack in GCF. Why not extend it to support responding to XML messages sent from AJAX/web applications?'
That's when the whole GCF-Application-Server project started.
As a result of all that is http://apps.vcreatelogic.com. Just have a look at it and check out for yourself, the things that are now possible. Please note: We have currently hosted these web-apps on a make-shift Linux server in our office. So you can expect crashes once in a while ;-)
