Juce

I recently discovered the Juce C++ library whilst reading about the very promising Jost plugin host. The library focuses on creating a good looking set of widgets, tools and non-GUI classes for developing specialist audio and graphical applications. It has an impressive commercial user base including Cycling 74, who according to this thread will be using it as a basis for the new Max 5 GUI.

After glancing through the demo Juce looks really well thought through, and quite comprehensive. However it does seem to duplicate a lot of functionality already present in the excellent wxWidgets library. One of the main differences being that wx uses platform-native widgets where possible, whereas Juce has its own cross-platform look-n-feel. wxWidgets also has excellent bindings for a range of interpreted languages including Ruby and Python. However, it does lack some of the more specialist features of Juce such as audio plugin support.

Juce is reported to have python bindings available via pyjuce, but I haven’t yet managed to make them work. If I do get them working, I’ll definitely give Juce a try and report back.