Hi,
I just updated from Juce to 8.0.0 to 8.0.1 and noticed that in 8.0.1. the GUI editor does not open, when selecting a GUI component and the option to add a GUI component to the project is gone, too.
Is that the correct behavior or a bug?
Raphael
This is the correct behaviour. The GUI editor has been deprecated for a long time, and was completely removed in 8.0.1.
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Ok, good to know and bad that it has gone.
there are certainly many good reasons to deprecate and ultimately kill the visual GUI editor.
and the juce staff has certainly weighed the pros and cons.
I leave aside discussions about third-party alternatives, modernization, priorities, the target framework, and more.
I leave them to more competent people.
but I still consider it a big big big loss.
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I ask myself, how hard could a be, to write a RAD for juce? What do you think?
if I have to judge by the number of interventions, it seems that very few of us are interested on this topic…
no one else?
The Gui Editor has hit limitations a long time before. It wasn’t maintained in a while. The code it produced was not ideal.
I wrote such an RAD tool, so it is doable, but only makes sense if you do it for multiple people, not just for yourself.
And there are more, just look the forum search…
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I know the possible alternatives, just as I know the history and flaws of the GUI offered by the projucer.
but this was not the point of my speech.
If you are not interested in alternatives, you might have answered yourself already.
What are developers who have been using this editor supposed to do now? This is shocking.
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It’s been at least 7 years now the GUI editor has been deprecated and not received significant updates. JUCE 6.0.1 was seemingly the last time it had any kind of fix/update.
When features are marked deprecated it’s our job as developers to think about what to do next and be ready for when the change actually happens from deprecated to obsoleted.
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You can start learning React, this is your future
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Well, it’s been in talks regarding deprecation for a while now.
We’re working on bringing back this sort of functionality, but we’re still trying to figure out the specifics, so keep in touch and we’ll provide some updates.
The real issues are that it’s difficult to accommodate so many simultaneous RAD workflows, and that novice developers might be turned away due to the lack of WYSIWYG features.
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It was also publicly stated (albeit maybe not so prominently) that it was being removed in JUCE 8.
I’m not fond of the GUI editor but I see it has some popularity so in that same topic I suggested the idea of asking the JUCE team to release the GUI editor in the public domain so that a communitiy effort may keep it alive/up to date if desired.
Someone interested in that may want to create a topic in “Feature Requests” to see how many people would be interested.
Projucer under JUCE 7 is GPL licensed, so as long as any code used from there remains under a GPLv3 (or compatible?) licensed application there is no problem. At least I think that’s the case, not a lawyer disclaimer!
I’d hazard a guess though that most people with the requisite knowledge required to pull the UI editor into its own new app don’t see any value in the UI editor in the first place. I may be wrong of course.
Any talk of the Projucer in the Feature Requests forum isn’t going to be met with the greatest enthusiasm.
So we decided to maintain our own version of the Projucer, but our WYSIWYG and live coding workflow is decoupled from it. It’s just a glorified project setup and asset management tool.
I’d hazard a guess though that most people with the requisite knowledge required to pull the UI editor into its own new app don’t see any value in the UI editor in the first place. I may be wrong of course.
Not necessarily. If I want to help newbie developers, I would guide them towards the UI editor, and slowly wean them off it.
Slightly off topic, but if we could use Rive to design, render and work with visual components in a JUCE plugin it would be quite a game changer. @kunitoki has made a great start on it with the yup project.
I also know that the Rive team are very interested in this from communications on their Discord.
IMO the Projucer GUI editor is not a good way to create UI. Much better to design and then code it (either with Rectangle::removeFromXxx or FlexBox) and use tools like Melatonin Inspector and JUCE_LIVE_CONSTANT to tweak.
I was pretty excited about Rive, but the editor is not free to use.
Since I am creating tools it is not an option for everybody.
Wait, how did I learn about this only now? That’s amazing!
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The free tier has be unlocked for unlimited personal files this week. I don’t use Rive but I think that allows to build arbitrarily size projects for free now.
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