Recommendation for converting from Qt app to Web app

Question

I currently have a Qt-based GUI application that simply provides a graphical dashboard (guages, graphs, and such) displaying real-time data provided by another application via a TCP connection. For architectural and security reasons, I have been told that my TCP connection is no longer allowed, and that an HTTPS websocket will be my only conduit. It was suggested that I convert my app to a webapp using HTML5 and Javascript. However, I'm not a web programmer, but may consider this an opportunity to learn a new technology. I want to understand the landscape a little better before making a decision. So, I think my choices are:

1. Convert my app to a web app, giving me all the advantages/disadvantages of web-based apps. More work for me, as it's a new technology and I already have the Qt/TCP version working fine. If this is the suggested approach, any suggestions on a development environment/tools would be appreciated.

2. Convert my current Qt app to us a client HTTPS connection rather than a TCP connection. Not sure this is possible. From what I've read, this may not be possible with QtWebKit. Seems strange?

Maybe there's another choice I'm not considering?

Answer 1

You can also use a mixed approach, using WT library. It's c++ (and QT inspired) based. It has a nice toolkit and supports websockets.

http://www.webtoolkit.eu/wt/examples/

Answer 2

Porting requires a lot of work. On Qt side there are at least two implementations of WebSockets:

1. QtWebSocket, Qt-based websocket server implementation and alpha-state implementation of websocket client.
2. WebSocket++, Boost-based websocket server and client implementation.