JavaCPP VS imgui-java

JavaCPP and presets for working with JNI

In the meantime you might want to check out JavaCPP: https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp

Maybe you can use JavaCPP?

Here is the code for JNI, which uses the prebuilt JavaCPP library to call the getpid function. We don't have to write all the manual C binding code and rituals as the JavaCPP library already does it.

Javacpp is the best ffi library of all https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp

As for our approach, we maintain a library called javacpp: https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp which proves a python wheel like experience where we distribute natively optimized c/c++ code (and even cuda accelerated code) as jar files on maven central. We also are able to develop with a python like experience by passing pointers around and other low level constructs directly allowing optimizations that you typically only get in c/c++.

https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp

* it maps naturally and efficiently many common features afforded by the C++ language and often considered problematic, including overloaded operators, class and function templates, callbacks through function pointers, function objects (aka functors), virtual functions and member function pointers, nested struct definitions, variable length arguments, nested namespaces, large data structures containing arbitrary cycles, virtual and multiple inheritance, passing/returning by value/reference/string/vector, anonymous unions, bit fields, exceptions, destructors and shared or unique pointers (via either try-with-resources or garbage collection), and documentation comments*

I did not try myself, but for JNI maybe this could make lives easier? https://github.com/bytedeco/javacpp

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.