imgui-java VS compose-multiplatform

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.

So, to add file associations, we need to be able to pass both the .properties file and the --file-associations option. At the time of writing this article, the org.jetbrains.compose plugin doesn't provide such a mechanism. There is an open issue on GitHub that describes a possible workaround, which, unfortunately seems to not work on macOS.

JetBrains has a simplified example of a general-purpose Compose text viewer here: https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform/blob/master/examples/codeviewer/shared/src/commonMain/kotlin/org/jetbrains/codeviewer/ui/editor/Editor.kt


Compose for desktop has a scrollbar component available. You probably can't use that directly on Android, but you could probably steal most of its code.

My company uses https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform to make a desktop app in Kotlin. It's amazing and fantastic. It's basically as mature as using Kotlin in an Android app.

Kamel is an asynchronous media loading library for Compose Multiplatform.

Kotlin Compose Multiplatform is the way to do Desktop apps. https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform

As for missing controls, a common one is a grid. They have built in grids, but again they are built for Android and don't make any sense in a desktop app. There is no simple way to create an Excel-like Data Grid like you might see in Windows Forms, although it can be done. https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-multiplatform/issues/344.