With 15 years of history, our Libraries page and Tools page are starting to get a little cluttered. While many of these programs are still used by our customers, others are no longer relevant. So we're going to archive some software in a separate section. But don't worry, everything will still be available. Let's take stock of the situation.
We've decided to move a few tools, as well as some programming libraries, to the archive. Let's start with the libraries.
The UWP and Objective-C libraries
If you've been following our posts, you've seen that almost all programming libraries have been updated to version 2.x, with the addition of support for secure network connections. We've taken special care to ensure that this migration is as smooth as possible for users.
However, there are still two libraries that use the 1.10 API: Objective-C and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). These two libraries have been downloaded very few times, and it's highly likely that no one has been using them for several years, since these two programming languages have more or less been abandoned by their creators. Apple has moved on to Swift, and Microsoft has moved on to .NET Core.
We have therefore decided to mark them as "deprecated". But what does that mean exactly?
These libraries remain available and usable: we will continue to fix security vulnerabilities and any critical bugs, and the libraries will even continue to be updated to add the classes needed to manage the new Yoctopuce modules. However, we will not systematically add major new features, such as support for HTTPS, IPv6, and so on.
This means that if you have projects that use these two libraries, you'll still be able to recompile them in the years to come, and we'll continue to support them and fix any issues that may remain in these libraries. But there will be no further development on these two libraries.
The Beta MATLAB library
Six years ago, we invested a considerable amount of development time in providing genuine native support for MATLAB. The library was initially released as a beta, and we hoped to gather user feedback before finalising it. Unfortunately, the interest in this library was clearly not up to the effort required to develop it. In six years, only one person contacted us about it. We therefore decided to archive it alongside the other libraries that no longer appear to be of any use to our customers, without ever releasing it from beta...
YoctoCloud and GatewayHub
YoctoCloud and GatewayHub are two tools we released about ten years ago, designed to provide remote access to measures taken by Yoctopuce modules, or to the modules themselves. These were fairly primitive solutions, which can now be advantageously replaced by VirtualHub (for web), possibly combined with Yocto-Visualization (for web).
YoctoCloud and GatewayHub are still available on our web site, but we have moved them to a Deprecated section.
VirtualHub (V1)
The original version of VirtualHub, which we've been distributing for 15 years, can now be effectively replaced by VirtualHub-V2. VirtualHub-V2 includes all the features of VirtualHub (V1) and offers additional new features such as:
- SSL/TLS support (see this post)
- IPv6 support (see this post)
- Enhanced security.
Unlike the CloudHub and GatewayHub tools, which we will no longer update, it is very likely that we will continue to provide updates for VirtualHub (V1), particularly to support very old Linux distributions and to ensure it continues to work with future Yoctopuce modules. However, to keep our website clear and avoid confusing new users, we've moved VirtualHub (V1) to the Deprecated section.
Conclusions
Even though we're archiving these rarely used tools, we're making sure this change doesn't cause any issues for anyone. We've grouped these programs into a Deprecated section for clarity, but they remain available. If you're using one of these tools and aren't sure how to switch to one of the mentioned alternatives, feel free to contact Yoctopuce support.
