Considerations for porting ESP to a new GUI framework.

[damellis]

How much support is there for custom plots / visualizations?
Does the ESP interface still need to be compiled against the ESP example?
How hard is it for others users to set up compilation against the GUI framework?

[nebgnahz]

Here is some quick information about Qt:

• IO Streams: serial reading, TCP, audio input.
• Plotting: there is basic QtCharts for line-charts. In addition, there are custom plotting libraries

Porting existing ESP codebase to Qt shouldn't be too hard (although definitely time-consuming). In fact, there are a couple things are can directly re-use given it's still C++.

Regarding the integration with examples, compilation/linking, I think as long as we stick to C/C++ code, the example itself has to be compiled.

1. Compile it together with the GUI.
2. Only link it against the GUI application
3. Compile it as a stand-alone application, but our framework provides a channel to get the data.

I think we all know option 1 and 2 reasonably well. I will elaborate a bit on option 3. Think of GDB or any debugger where the debugger runs in a separate process and talks to the running process. Our GUI application is simply a front-end that communicates with the back-end. In such a way, we could swap the front-end with web apps or other GUIs.

[damellis]

Another question is how we compile the example (i.e. what IDE and build process to use). Some options:

a. Continue using existing platform-specific IDEs (e.g. Xcode, Visual Studio, cmake).
b. Use a cross-platform IDE (e.g. Processing or Sublime?).
c. Edit and compile ESP examples from within the ESP interface. I think this requires us to use your option (3).

It's debatable how much (c) would get us over (b), as re-compiling the example code is probably going to reset much of the data in the other parts of the interface. Sticking with (b) would mean we could avoid having to build the front-end / back-end communication channel required for your option (3).

[damellis]

Let's defer this for now, as it's a big task and not the top priority.