Midland Valley Exploration Ltd.
Qt helps Midland Valley reduce development by up to a year increasing resource efficiency and lowering costs.
Midland Valley pioneered the application of structural balance to
extensional and oblique slip basins, first in the North Sea and then on
a world-wide basis. To assist project work, both in house and for our
consulting clients, Midland Valley set about developing a suite of
software analysis programs in structural geology.
The Challenge
The Midland Valley Exploration team was planning on a major re-design of its product suite, a sophisticated structural geology application that provides insight into subsurface exploration via 3D visualization. They wanted the new application to run on Linux and Windows as well as their legacy UNIX systems and to integrate seamlessly with their graphics toolkit, Coin 3D.
The Solution
Qt enabled the team to streamline its UI
development process for faster coding. The results were impressive, with the new
application appearing native on all platforms without any code tweaks.
Additionally, Qt worked seamlessly with the graphics toolkit, Coin 3D, to enable
the addition of visualization functionality. The MVE team also leveraged the
selection of widgets and third party add-ons and libraries available with Qt.
The Value
The experience of developing cross-platform GUIs with Qt and
Coin3D was a resounding success. The tools saved programmers up to a year of
development time, allowing them the freedom to focus on product features,
quality and robustness. The reduced time and efficient resource use resulted in
decreased cost while the finished, feature-rich application delivered increased
customer satisfaction.
“It was clear to us that Qt is a mature platform with mature OpenGL module support, and a tried and tested C++ solution – two things we absolutely needed.” – Colin Dunlop, Principal Software Engineer, Midland Valley Exploration Ltd.
