aurora VS imgui-java

+1 I really hope that they add official desktop controls. Just wanted to mention this library https://github.com/kirill-grouchnikov/aurora It has some pretty good looking desktop controls, in the meantime.

If you don't mind me asking: by "missing app framework" for Compose Desktop, do you mean a framework for WIMP components? I know that there is the Aurora project which brings these components to Compose Desktop (haven't tried it myself, though)

I haven't tried it yet but for GUI options there's Aurora

there's a library for that

Or you could use something like that: https://github.com/kirill-grouchnikov/aurora

Check out https://github.com/kirill-grouchnikov/aurora for some ideas on how to do this (custom components, etc...).

Not specifically a Windows theme per se, but you should take a look at Aurora.

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.