CLIM

Command line interface menu (CLIM) engine for JVM offers a very simple system to manage UI menus via the cli.

Motivation

CLIM may be useful when prototyping core libraries in their early stage, in absence of advanced GUI yet. For example, when you are developing core component for multi-platform environments and you need to use or distribute it in its early stage.

Download

You can download the last compiled version of CLIM from the releases page, or import it from maven bintray.

Usage

See the Demo.java for a simple example.

Overview

The main components of CLIM are:

• Engine
• Menu
• Entry
• Streams

Engine

Engine is the main component organizing menus, printing to OutputStream and reading from InputStream. To create a new engine use its constructor:

Engine engine = new Engine("CLIM DEMO");

To start the engine:

engine.start();

To wait for the engine to terminate its execution (blocking call):

engine.await();

Menu

A Menu is a list of entries.

The simplest way to create a menu is by using the engine's method buildMenu():

Menu mainMenu = engine.buildMenu("Main menu");

this will create a new menu but it won't add it on the top of the engine.

Add as many entries as you want:

mainMenu.addEntry(newEntry);

Or add a sub-menu as entry:

Menu secondMenu = new Menu("Second menu", "cancel", engine);
//...
mainMenu.addSubMenu(secondMenu);

finally add the menu to the engine:

engine.addOnTop(mainMenu);

To create a menu and add it on top automatically, use:

Menu myMenu = engine.buildMenuOnTop("My Menu");

Entry

An Entry represents an option the user can choose. You need to implement the onAction() abstract method of an entry in order to specify its action.

To create an Entry use the constructor:

Entry newEntry = new Entry("New Entry", ()->{/*do stuff...*/} );

or use the wrapping method from menu object:

Entry newEntry = myMenu.addEntry("New Entry", ()->{/*do stuff...*/} );

Change Entry's visibility to hide/show it on menu list.

Streams

CLIM's Stream is an object used for streaming input and output data. By default, the Engine uses ScannerInputStream and SystemOutputStream which uses the System.in and System.out streams. You can define your custom streams by implementing the InputStream and OutputStream classes.

It is possible to assign custom streams to the engine:

engine.setInputStream(customInputStream);
engine.setOutStream(customOutputStream);

Copyright

Copyright(c) 2021 Sebastiano Campisi - ianovir.com. Read LICENSE file for more details.