Considering a Purchase of JUCE / The Future of JUCE Development

General JUCE discussion
1

I’ve been testing the waters with JUCE for about 4 months now and have really grown to love the classes and the Projucer a ton. I’m still very much a novice in the programming world, as I’m still a student (junior level computer science major), however, I’m feeling like I will be able to distribute utilitarian type apps in the near future and am heavily considering purchasing JUCE so I can keep my source code closed. It is my impression that JUCE started out as being more geared towards audio development in the beginning, but has expanded in the recent years to try to cover programming in all general senses (please correct me if I’m wrong). Personally, I’m mainly using JUCE to create non-audio related applications. I guess I’m just curious to know if JUCE will continue to expand to compete with all general purpose cross-platform libraries or if it will focus more on audio development. Its hard to imagine where else they could go with it because it is already so damn massive and flexible. My curiosity comes from the words spoken to me by my professional developer friends who use JUCE to earn a living. Some of them entirely recommend that I continue my use of JUCE to make whatever non-audio related applications I want, while others are urging me to look into either libraries, as they feel JUCE might be focused so much on the audio aspect that other regions aren’t well-addressed enough. So I’m merely curious to know what other users here think and maybe, if allowed, hear what sort of direction the development of JUCE might follow. I’m entirely ready to purchase a cross-platform library and I think it will be JUCE, as I think its great and totally love the classes and the Projucer (however, I’ve not tried any others such as QT, etc.). This community has been great to me and seems entirely wholesome, so I wanted to get your honest opinion; if others think I should check into other libraries or if others think that JUCE is entirely useable in a large variety of programming contexts. Where JUCE weak points might exist… (I have a good idea of its strengths).

Thank you for your input and apologies for the wall of text.

2

Like with any software, I suppose the recommendation is : “don’t buy it now if it doesn’t already properly do what you want”.

3

It used to work like that, but not anymore.

Case in point, on mobile platforms, you can buy an app today which handles all the things you need. But there’s nothing preventing the vendor from pushing an update tomorrow which strips away some features you need. Tough luck if that happens.

Toolkits like Juce are a special case. Operating systems are moving targets and often, new versions introduce new features you’d like to have implemented in the toolkit (an recent example is support for per-screen DPI settings). Or there’s things which don’t work and have to be fixed. For both cases you need to know if your chosen toolkit will be updated some time in the future.