A Clojure library that serves as a meta-library/wrapper around other libraries and convenience packages, to ensure the widest range of GUI and utility support across Java versions and operating systems.
In general, I plan to ensure compatability with all JRE from Java 8 to Java 12+ for the packages that are installed as dependencies (this obviously means versions of some packages will be out of date - usually that's fine, particularly if we weren't using some feature of them anyways).
The main bullet-points I want to hit with this are common things that many GUI interfaces will tend to require, but may not cleanly fall into the Clojure built in facilities:
- GUI rendering
- GUI Theming/Styling
- Networking + Serialization
- Logging
- Data Persistence (config file based)
These have been tested and known to work, on a range of JRE environments, from Windows 7 (32 bit) + Oracle JRE 8 (last 32 Oracle one), to Win7 + Zulu OpenJDK JRE 8 to 12, as well as Arch Linux and Ubuntu OpenJDKs 8 to 12.
See notes for some details into why this sort of won by default.
- Clojure Seesaw: https://github.com/daveray/seesaw
- Styles + enhancements to swing: https://github.com/kirill-grouchnikov/radiance
Some of the packages (radiance) had to be installed at their 1.x versions, as they are the last ones that had maven jars compiled to work with Java API version 52 (aka, Java 8).
Radiance has a great theming tool, that you can see in the demo when you boot this app up.
Considered but didn't work out:
- JavaFX is a slick library, but support for it across Java versions is very hard to align. Oracle Java 8 ships with it built in, OpenJDK 8 ships it as a separate package on GNU/Linux distributions. Later versions of Java (9 and 10) don't seem to have it in a clear location. Java 11 has it as a separate Maven installable library. It might be a good choice for a cross-version / OS jar, if you get to dictate what Java version your potential userbase must use (or if it was for an internal app where you provision the appropriate software on the target machines).
- cljfx (https://github.com/cljfx/cljfx) is a great library, but has an intentional design choice to only support the latest underlying systems. As such, it was complicated to get working on Arch Linux as well as Windows. The fact it is closely tied to JavaFX also makes it difficult to use.
- fn-fx (https://github.com/fn-fx/fn-fx) has similar problems to cljfx - very hard to use across a wide-berth of targets (see the usage matrix on their github readme for a testament to that - way too many red Xs)
On ArchLinux you can use sudo archlinux-java set java-8-openjdk/jre
or sudo archlinux-java set java-12-openjdk (Ubuntu has an update
alternatives approach).
On Windows, you can adjust in your ~/.lein/profile.clj by adding something like this:
{:user
{
:java-cmd "C:\\Program\ Files\\Java\\jdk1.8.0_202\\bin\\java.exe "
;; :java-cmd "C:\\Users\\IEUser\\scoop\\apps\\zulu12\\current\\bin\\java.exe"
}
}- Integrate xdg-rc package (add windows support there) to allow the 'default' gui view / package to easily incorporate the radiant theme switcher and save user setting for this.
- Figure out keybind to quickly cycle through active tabs (alt+N to go to that tab, ctrl + tab / ctrl + shift + tab to iterate across)
- Figure out how to add X to tab to close it out
Copyright © 2019 Matthew Carter m@ahungry.com
This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License 2.0 which is available at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-2.0.
This Source Code may also be made available under the following Secondary Licenses when the conditions for such availability set forth in the Eclipse Public License, v. 2.0 are satisfied: GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version, with the GNU Classpath Exception which is available at https://www.gnu.org/software/classpath/license.html.