Aparapi VS imgui-java

That already looks much better. Too bad you're limited to no external dependencies. This could be a nice test project for aparapi (e.g. https://foojay.io/today/high-performance-rendering-in-javafx/).

That might be Aparapi; the original version created by AMD was abandoned but there is a community-driven version that is still maintained.

There's aparapi: https://github.com/Syncleus/aparapi which support OpenCL.

The closest I know of: https://github.com/Syncleus/aparapi

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.