[linux-audio-user] Re: ANN: JOST, a simple host for native VST - juce and gui theming

[Kjetil S. Matheussen]

Tim Orford:
>>>
>> I'll add an "Amen!" to that. The new GUI for Mammut is impressive, I'd
>> love to see more Linux audio apps use the JUCE framework.
>
> A few people have been saying nice things about JUCE gui toolkit recently,
> but I must somehow be missing its attractions.
>
> What gui problems does this toolkit solve? I can imagine that it is simpler
> to program for, but at what cost?
>

I chose Juce for the new Mammut because I like using a new gui set, and I 
hadn't used juce before. The other reason is that juce is very 
good looking.

In the start, I was very sceptical, because it was obviously not 
completely mature on linux, so I had to spend some time fixing 16 bits 
display and xshm. Juce's Alsa audio support is still not working 
completely yet, but I added jack support to mammut as well, so its not a 
big deal for me.

I was also sceptical to the widgets, because after playing 
around with the gui builder program "jucer", it didn't seem to offer many 
types of widgets or configuration of widgets. However, it quickly came 
apparent that its the jucer that is limited, and not juce. But that 
doesn't matter, because its very easy to customize the code that juce 
produce.

Another nice thing about juce, which came very apparent after working with 
it, is that its been made with the user in mind, thinking one step further 
than whats normal about what the user normally wants to do. So therefore 
code written with juce is very little verbose. Compared to qt and gtk 
code, juce code is relatively (we're talking C++) small and pretty. Theres 
also a bunch of nice classes for doing stuff you normally do in a program, 
like preferences, warnings, timers, etc. And its all done in a way where 
you can get a lot done by writing very little, while still being able to 
configure things if you want.



> If an application has any pretension to actually having any users, it
> needs to respect the ui choices of the user, and utilise the system theme(s)

I don't see the point of that. Lets have anarchy. In radium, I use gtk, 
qt, tk, xterm, and xlib, all simultaniously in the same program. I think 
thats a cool way to do it. Pick the best gui kit for the task you are 
about to do, and get the job done.