Lanterna
Jimfs
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Lanterna | Jimfs | |
---|---|---|
19 | 5 | |
2,192 | 2,378 | |
- | 0.7% | |
7.2 | 8.6 | |
about 1 month ago | 6 days ago | |
Java | Java | |
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only | Apache License 2.0 |
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Lanterna
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Textual Web: TUIs for the Web
I wrote a TUI before for work, entirely of my own volition and for my own near-exclusive consumption (it was theoretically for anyone, but I'm the only person who would've had a reason to look at it - we were a fairly silo'd dev shop).
This is what made me pick TUI over a web UI:
* no web stack, period. no client/server. no js or html. this simplified the problem dramatically. also, no additional services to babysit.
* no browser - no certificates, security, auth, etc. It's just unix permissions and ssh.
* there's something comforting about the constraints of just ASCII/ANSI and curses. No bikeshedding over border widths or radii when it's just you picking among a few characters for the shape. just having less decisions to make speeds things up and helps you focus on what you actually want the UI to be able to do.
Obviously if your app is just calling APIs anyway, that might be negate some of these bullets about no additional services to babysit etc. In this case, it was running an internal infra app that directly connected to a pg db.
And what made me pick it over just having a CLI:
* discoverability - it was a complicated app and while it was all technically exposed via cli flags, having a GUI made it a lot easier to figure out what the right incantation is.
* richer communication medium that's back-and-forth instead of unidirectional. The TUI is able to fetch a list of e.g. valid IDs and let you pick them with a check-list, instead of you having to go query the db yourself and type them in.
I consider it one of my greatest victories that my boss was able to use the TUI to recover from an incident without needing to page me while I was on holiday, and he said he barely had to read the docs and felt confident he was getting it right the first time. "I did it while sipping my coffee."
I used https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna - would recommend. They even have a Swing-based emulation mode for easy development iteration running it from intelliJ.
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Textual: Rapid Application Development Framework for Python
This looks really cool.
In the past I used lanterna (https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna/tree/master) to develop a text UI for a critical process at the trading firm I worked at. It was essentially a process that would take updated market data and handle things that changed between the last trading session and today - like symbol renames (PCLN to BKNG), changes to market cap that make it change what "category" it fell into (they were based on market cap and volatility measures etc). Things of that nature, that the realtime system didn't handle but happened too often or were too hairy for us to just handle manually.
The system had a desktop UI component that was oriented towards use by our trading staff. We didn't really have notion of a "server UI" and the server was headless.
Nobody at our firm was a frontend developer, just backend, systems and data programmers who occasionally dabbled in frontend. So web UIs were very simplistic or highly specific to their use-case, we had no shared tooling.
In 2023 with things like create-react-app and whatever next.js does, I probably would've opted for one of those. I could've made another desktop app but I wanted to be able to easily get to this from a shitty ssh connection over tethered 4g when I was on-call. So X11 forwarding and RDP were out. So i looked around for a TUI-builder in the project's language, Java.
What i really liked about Lanterna was that it had a Swing-based implementation which meant I could easily run it from IntelliJ, and that would let me iterate rapidly, and then in production I could run it in a terminal via SSH directly on the machine the server was on (which had certain advantages).
I'll keep an eye on this to see if I can think of anything neat to build on it. I still generally don't like web apps because they feel like they take a lot of effort to get something compared to a functionally-equivalent product built in something non-browser-based like a TUI or desktop GUI.
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What options are there for making GUIs and other visual programs using java?
Just to differ what others already mentioned: Lanterna. Pretty retro GUIs just for fun.
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Library like Python Rich
Lanterna https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna Has examples for most of the things you're looking for (see links in https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna/blob/master/docs/contents.md)
- Terminal Design Through Java.
- Nimwave – build TUIs for the terminal, web, and desktop
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How to modify lines in console (Java 8)
You can use a library such as https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna to do fancy console printing. You could even do full console UIs, but just printing lines and moving the cursor and so on is also possible I think.
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Aquifer: GUI generator for command line apps
There is lanterna for that.
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Textual in Clojure?
You can use https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna
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What are some features necessary in an ASCII-graphics library?
Is this just a personal excercise? Because https://github.com/mabe02/lanterna is pretty much what you're talking about and pretty good.
Jimfs
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How to write unit tests in C++ relying on non-code files?
Java has in-memory file systems that are essentially geared for this exact use case, eg jimfs[0]. You create your filesystem and any files you need when your tests are starting up, and your classes talk to them rather than the “real” ones. Maybe a similar project exists for the C++ ecosystem?
[0] https://github.com/google/jimfs
- An in-memory file system for Java
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Any library you would like to recommend to others as it helps you a lot? For me, mapstruct is one of them. Hopefully I would hear some other nice libraries I never try.
Recently been using JIMFS. Made my tests much faster and cleaner!
- An in memory file system
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Working and unit testing with temporary files in Java
I use Google's JIMFS "Just In Memory Filesystem" https://github.com/google/jimfs in my unit tests and have been very happy. No need to clean something up that disappears as soon as the test is over. Let's you create unix or windows style filesystems and I've used it to test a disk space healthcheck because you can set a limit to the size of the filesystem it creates. Very flexible and easy to use.
What are some alternatives?
CQEngine - Ultra-fast SQL-like queries on Java collections
Modern Java - A Guide to Java 8 - Modern Java - A Guide to Java 8
OpenRefine - OpenRefine is a free, open source power tool for working with messy data and improving it
jcurses - Java Curses implementation
Joda-Money - Java library to represent monetary amounts.
LightAdmin - [PoC] Pluggable CRUD UI library for Java web applications
JBake - Java based open source static site/blog generator for developers & designers.
Codename One - Cross-platform framework for building truly native mobile apps with Java or Kotlin. Write Once Run Anywhere support for iOS, Android, Desktop & Web.
J2ObjC - A Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime.
Maven Wrapper - The easiest way to integrate Maven into your project!