Qt helps Barco™ reduce product development time by 30%
Barco™, a global technology company, designs and develops
visualization products for a variety of selected professional markets:
medical imaging, media & entertainment, infrastructure &
utilities, traffic & transportation, defense & security,
education & training and corporate AV.
The Challenge
Barco’s newest range of digital projectors,
which include 3D capabilities, is designed to deliver not only the
highest quality digital cinema films, but also events, television
series, live concerts and large screen video games. The new line is
built around the company’s unique Communicator Touch Panel, which comes
as a standard projector component across all models. Designed for
multi-user control, the Communicator features an easy-to-use touch
screen interface.
The redesign of the Communicator application called for a
development framework that would meet a number of stringent criteria.
First of all, Barco determined that the new Communicator application,
which initially was targeted only on the touch panel, would be ported
to the desktop and run on Windows, Linux and Mac. With this strategy,
it was critical to have a single API set for all targeted platforms and
to get the best possible performance for each platform.
“We made the choice to port our existing Qt PC application to the Qt Embedded Linux platform,” said Philippe Martin, Sr. Software Engineer Digital Cinema, Barco Media & Entertainment Division. “That way, we were able to reuse almost all source code that what was written for the existing PC application.”
At the same time, the Communicator needed an easy-to-use interface
encompassing multiple touch-panel functionalities. The touch panel
interface was meant to simplify the tasks of cinema operators who need
basic control of the projector from controlling the lamp and preset
input switch to starting and stopping play lists on the cinema server.
The Solution
Qt’s intuitive API allowed for a strong
graphical user interface and delivered one source code to deploy on
multiple platforms. The Qt layout system enabled developers to get
layouts just right and was more intuitive than Java. QGraphicsview is a
strong graphical component that is quite unique and very powerful.
Creating strong graphical user interfaces with this component is really
an easy process.
“Qt was the only product that ran cross-platform from the PC
environment to the embedded environment, giving our application native
performance. Without Qt, it would not have been possible to support
native applications on all four targeted platforms,” said Philippe
Martin.
The Benefit
In addition to the technology, Qt’s high level
of support was a key differentiator. Not only did the company provide
response to any question the developers had within one or two business
days, they provided a clear picture of the roadmap for future
functionality of its next release.
Based on that insight, Barco built new features into its own product
roadmap and is looking forward to using the integrated Webkit
integration and enhanced QGraphicsView components to design the next
generation of projectors.
Finally, and most importantly, Barco noted
the streamlined development process as a significant benefit. The
company credits Qt technology and the product’s ease of use with
reducing the number of developers needed for platform-specific coding
and shortening product development time by 30 percent.
