jdeploy VS HumbleUI

See http://www.jdeploy.com/

You could try jdeploy as well.

Why would someone use conveyor over https://www.jdeploy.com/

Agree. For quite a while it was hard to deploy JavaFX applications but jpackage exists now. There are also tools out there which do everything for you :https://www.jdeploy.com/https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/1.0/

How does it compare to jdeploy?

You can try https://www.jdeploy.com. I didn't try it yet. I use GitHub Actions which allow me to deploy to all platforms by just pushing to the master branch (or whichever you set up). It's free for a certain amount of machine runtime minutes. Shouldn't be a problem for a personal application.

You build your Clojure app as an uberjar, yes. Only gotcha here is to remember "-Dcljfx.skip-javafx-initialization=true" so the JFX thread doesn't get started during build, and I've had no problems using Clojure's direct linking either. You use jlink[1] to create a custom runtime JRE image (this isn't strictly necessary if you're deploying to machines with a JRE but it cuts down on moving parts and gives you more control). jpackage[2] then takes that runtime image and your uberjar and creates installers for Mac/Windows/Linux. Both are command line tools, and we just have GitHub Actions that cut new releases for each platform when we tag something with a new version.

Worth also keeping an eye on jDeploy[2] which adds extra goodies like auto updates, at the cost of some npm shenanigans. Not something I've played with yet though.

1: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/specs/man/jli...

2: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/specs/man/jpa...

3: https://www.jdeploy.com/

So you can see, there are really a lot of choices but none of them dominates, which means they all have flaws. You can read a good article from Niki Tonsky where Clojure UI problems are discussed. Also to address the problems Niki Tonsky started the development of a new UI for Clojure, called Humble UI. So now we have one more option :)

If you don't mind being stuck on Windows you could use Visual C# or Visual Basic, they have edit-and-continue too. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/edit... I've worked with the SuperTux C# level editor in the past. C# was actually pretty nice for GUI stuff.

There doesn't seem to be a good GUI framework for Clojure. There was Seesaw but it hasn't been updated since 2019. There is a guy developing a new framework https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/ but it's WIP. I guess you could sidestep this by making it a webapp and using figwheel.

UI toolkits: https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI and https://github.com/phronmophobic/membrane

Nikita Prokopov is developing Humble UI which is worth keeping a close eye on. (Yes, it's Clojure, but Java interop is bound to emerge if it builds up a critical mass and catches on.)

https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI/

I've made a few desktop apps in https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx (e.g., https://www.chronos-desk.com/), and cljfx (JavaFX + Clojure) is amazing and makes for rapid development, not to mention fun. I'm keeping an eye on https://github.com/HumbleUI/HumbleUI, which promises to be a step up.