I’m checking out JUCE for my first audio app, a commercial project. It looks sweet! I’ve done lots of MIDI programming, “realtime” and file I/O, but am new to audio. I’ve also done lots of (not always pretty) GUI/app programming with wxWidgets.
JUCE looks really great and I’m impressed by the list of users, but when I see Jules’ comments about no plans for JUCE 3.0, and look at the posts over the last year+ asking about Vista/WaveRT(?) support, Cocoa support, and general 64-bit support, I see Jules’ hesitation to update the code and unless I’m mistaken he’s the only one who maintains the code. This makes me unsure about JUCE’s future as a toolkit, especially for choosing it for a new project.
Jules, could you share your thoughts about the future of JUCE and your involvement? If you were to decide not to actively keep developing it, would there be any problems releasing it as a full open source project with contributions from the community keeping it going? But that would complicate things for commercial use. Are there any other developers who’ve been sharing maintainence with you? I’m not interested in pushing you in any particular direction, just would like to get a feel for JUCE’s longevity.
BTW, since I’m new to audio, if you anyone has some favorite refs for learning audio programming (device and file streaming, realtime processing) please let me know. Thanks!
Also, I’m impressed with the breadth of JUCE’s functionality, especially from a single developer. Jules, did you build this all yourself, or is the ComponentPeer core from Java somehow?
Glad you like it, but I think you sound a lot more pessimistic that you should do - I use and develop it every day. When I said I had no plans for a V3, all I meant was that I currently don’t know what a V3 would look like, not that I don’t intend carrying on that far!
And it’s already a full open-source project, of course. Even if I disappeared tomorrow, the GPL means that anyone who wanted to can keep on developing and distributing it. And I’m sure there are probably people who’d want to acquire it.
But all that’s irrelevent - I’m fully on-the-case here! And if you all go out and persuade thousands of your friends to buy a copy, I’ll make enough money to employ some more coders and get it going even faster!
Thanks, it’s good to know you’re fully on the case.
The GPL license is of course good for the project’s future for non-commercial projects, but it’s a risk of course to develop a commercial app using the framework without good odds that subsequent versions will still be available for commercial licensing downline. But like you say, odds are good someone would acquire commercial licensing rights from you, but hopefully with the intent of continuing licensing to other commercial developers.
Interestingly, I do have thousands of friends who want to buy a copy, but they’re waiting for V3 before they drop the cash! Actually, if cash flow is a factor for your time and outside dev support, maybe you could offer a pre-pay dicount for V3 licenses to get things jump-started.
If I remember correctly, Tracktion is built on JUCE, and that will presumably need full WaveRT device support (unless it never really gets used!), Cocoa and 64-bit support. Will Mackie be using an updated public version of JUCE, or do they extend it in-house?
All this talk of V3 is interesting - since not even I have any idea what a “V3” would look like, I’m glad that you’re already excited about it! Juce is a project that evolves gradually, not somethere where I’ll suddenly release a huge new version that I’ve been developing in a secret bunker for ages. V3 will be whatever the code looks like when I think to myself “feels like about time to give it a new major version number”
And yes, I’m sure if I lost interest (which is unlikely as I use juce every day for my other projects) someone would want the commercial rights. Or if not, I’d probably let it go to LGPL or something. In any case, I’d certainly avoid stitching-up any of my users - that just wouldn’t be polite.
waveRT… hmm… Since Windows 7 is already on the horizon, I think I’ll wait and see what happens before I bother going through the hassle of adding support for it. WDM is something I keep tinkering with, so that might appear in the meantime. Mackie, as far as I know, just use the public codebase, so they’d probably appreciate having support for that.
Speaking of which… isn’t it time to tag a 1.46 version of JUCE ? For some reason I can’t really express, I prefer having a certain version to build my projects against, rather than always be on the bleeding edge…
[quote=“jules”]All this talk of V3 is interesting - since not even I have any idea what a “V3” would look like, I’m glad that you’re already excited about it! Juce is a project that evolves gradually, not somethere where I’ll suddenly release a huge new version that I’ve been developing in a secret bunker for ages. V3 will be whatever the code looks like when I think to myself “feels like about time to give it a new major version number”
And yes, I’m sure if I lost interest (which is unlikely as I use juce every day for my other projects) someone would want the commercial rights. Or if not, I’d probably let it go to LGPL or something. In any case, I’d certainly avoid stitching-up any of my users - that just wouldn’t be polite.
waveRT… hmm… Since Windows 7 is already on the horizon, I think I’ll wait and see what happens before I bother going through the hassle of adding support for it. WDM is something I keep tinkering with, so that might appear in the meantime. Mackie, as far as I know, just use the public codebase, so they’d probably appreciate having support for that.[/quote]
Thanks, all good to know. And yeah, it certainly doesn’t seem worth worrying about waveRT unless it actually catches on.
Actually, if cash flow is a factor for your time and outside dev support, maybe you could offer a pre-pay dicount for V3 licenses to get things jump-started.