Hi there! I have a quick announcement to make.

🔊 My company has launched a new product with the goal of making distributing desktop apps as easy as distributing a static website. It's a competitor to jpackage called Conveyor and has deep integration and support for JVM apps. One of the sample apps is the sampler for the AtlantaFX theme, so it might be very useful for cljfx users: https://hydraulic.software/

It's a bit like jpackage++ and should be usable to replace jpackage in almost every scenario. The main benefits are: • Packages are self-updating. You can push out updates by just rebuilding and reuploading the download site, and they'll apply in the background automatically. You can use GitHub Releases to host your update repositories. • Packages cross-build, including signing and notarization because it doesn't use any native tooling. You can make fully signed, notarized and self-updating macOS apps without a Mac. You don't even need a Mac to get signing keys. Ditto for Windows. Any combination works. • It generates a simple download.html page that detects the user's OS and CPU to give them a big green button style experience. • You can self-sign apps easily if you don't have/want signing certificates. The download page will contain shell commands you can copy/paste into a terminal to install the packages without security errors.

It's free for open source projects. The main downside relative to jpackage is that for proprietary projects, you need a license. Or will do when the introductory period ends at least - for now because it's new, it's free for everyone.

There's full documentation here: https://conveyor.hydraulic.dev/ . The goal of the company is to build platforms competitive with the web so we can use whatever languages, tools, libraries and protocols we want whilst retaining the benefits of working with web browsers.

I hope this information is useful to the cljfx community! The product also supports packaging servers (debs with full systemd integration), and will soon support CLI apps too, so it may be useful to Clojurians even when not writing GUIs. But I'll announce that in other channels when the support for those use cases is more advanced.