The Challenge

The Help application maintained by the Cadence development team took as long as thirty or forty seconds to become available to their users. Not only was the application slow, when the information finally arrived, it was in standard user manual form. To find an answer, customers had to wade through a book.

To develop a speedier Help application that would allow users to view, manage, index and search topic-based content, the team needed cross-platform capability as well as rich GUI components, HTML rendering, Networking and XML capabilities.

The Solution

The development team leveraged the HTML capabilities in Qt so that the Help application was topic based, not chapter based, and offered links to related subjects. XML was introduced so that users could navigate easily through new and legacy content.

The new Qt-enabled Help application is used by all Cadence tools, with each point tool initializing and communicating with the Help system through an API that uses a socket-based approach.

The team became proficient in socket-based communication quickly thanks to Qt-provided classes and simple interfaces that enabled the developers to create applications quickly.

The Value

The new help application not only delivers increased performance and functionality, the code base is less than half that of the legacy system.

”Developing and maintaining a single source of code for an application that is delivered on multiple platforms means huge savings in terms of development resources and time.”
Chris Walsh, Cadence