ImFrame VS imgui-java

If you need a quick way to start a C++ ImGui app, you can use my ImFrame library. It's essentially a C++ application wrapper around glfw + ImGUI, along with a few handy additions that applications might need, like native file and folder dialogs, automatic windows settings / persistence, etc.

If you want a demo, you can use my starter framework to see if it would work for you, or check out Implot's repository directly.

If you want a Dear Imgui "starter kit", you can try ImFrame. It packages a few libraries into a very lightweight cross-platform application framework.

If you just want an empty app in which you can play with ImGui, you can use a lightweight framework like ImFrame.

To help with this, I made a framework that makes it much easier to use like a more traditional application framework, providing a few handy features you'd expect, like native file dialogs, window position save/restore, native macOS windows, platform-appropriate settings storage, image loading, a selection of fonts, etc.

Probably the fastest way to do that is to use something like my ImFrame library, which is designed to get Dear ImGui and ImPlot up and running inside an app with minimal fuss and bother. You'll need to use CMake to build the project, but it's pretty simple, as there are batch files to build in the /Bin folder for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Dear ImGUI - Unlike the others, is designed for applications with a real-time rendering loop, such as games. Was originally designed for creating debugging UIs, although has expanded far beyond this, and is now used for full-featured applications. Requires an existing back-end to plug into. If you need an application framework for Dear ImGUI, you can use my own project ImFrame, or something similar.

I use CMake as my (meta) build system, and generate VS projects on Windows, Xcode projects on Mac, and Code::Blocks projects/makefiles on Linux. Example of one such project of mine: https://github.com/JamesBoer/ImFrame

I'm currently writing a Dear Imgui framework called ImFrame. It handles the work of creating an application loop with an appropriate renderer, using GLFW and other open source libraries, and then exposing the Dear Imgui API for your use to do what you want with it.

For example, in one of my libraries (you can see the whole thing here), I'm including the single-header library stb_image.h as a separate project, so it shows up with all the other external libraries. It's not necessary for compilation, but is just there to assist with browsing / seeing all the external libraries.

So this makes me wonder: how common is desktop app development with Java these days? I imagine there is still a lot done for internal app, but is it still viable to ship Java apps to end users? How you handle JRE distribution in that case?

Anyway also wanna shout out Dear ImGui[0]. I've been using it recently to build an interactive UI to quite complicated networking code. So far it been great for manual testing and demos, and it's fairly low maintenance once running.

[0] https://github.com/SpaiR/imgui-java

If you aren't off-put by the Blender/Unity UI style, there's also ImGUI a possibility as it has some java bindings available.

If you want a library that has an active community and a lot of examples try out imgui (java port: https://github.com/SpaiR/imgui-java). It is a C based language but seems like the port are pretty close to the original api so you can follow not only the java docs but the c/c++ ones as well. There are a few game engines that utilizes imgui in the editor because it is lightweight, easy to extend, theme and use.