Seamly2D is an open-source digital design application, with a global user-base of thousands of users. The project breaks down the walled garden of advanced digital design tooling, by providing a capable, free and open-source application, empowering fashion designers of all sizes. The project founder’s vision extends beyond the desktop application that exists today, and there was interest in exploring the feasibility of converting it into a web application.

Porting an 11-year-old large C++/Qt5 application to the web, especially by the traditional rewrite approach, would be prohibitively complex for the open-source project’s available contributors and resources.

Fortunately, WebAssembly offers an alternative approach.

We were delighted to be approached by the project founder to explore the feasibility of porting the application to the Web. Porting the application to WebAssembly would preserve the vast majority of the codebase, and dramatically reduce the effort required to build a web-based experience.

The intial phase of the project required upgrading the application’s technolgy stack from Qt5 to Qt6, the latest version of the Qt C++ GUI framework with WebAssembly support. Our capable team delivered an upgraded version of the desktop application based on the latest Desktop UI technology, setting the stage for a Web-based PoC.

Following that, we succesfully prototyped a fully browser-based version of the application by compiling the original C++ to Wasm, laying down the foundation for a future complete web-based experience.

Our successful open-source collaboration led to an updated version of the current Seamly2D application, based on the latest desktop UI stack, bringing performance and developer experience improvements to its current users and open-source contributors.

In addition, The Wasm prototype provided the necessary groundwork for a fundraising and marketing effort that will see a significant investment in a powerful, modern, web-based design tool that democratizes digital fashion design.