What is it?
The Banana User Interface toolkit is built atop the jMonkeyEngine (JME), a 3D engine for Java that is currently built on top of LWJGL. BUI aims to provide an interface toolkit with the following characteristics:
- A component hierarchy and event dispatch model familiar to users of Swing and the AWT
- An easily customizable look and feel to allow game developers the necessary flexibility to create an interface consistent with their game's art style
- As full-featured as possible a user experience, providing standard UI functionality such as focus, cut and paste, keyboard navigation and control and so forth (we have a long way to go on this front)
- An open source license that allows the toolkit to be used and extended at no cost by developers working on personal and commercial projects
BUI is presently in the very early stages, but is being rapidly expanded in conjunction with a commercial game. As functionality is needed within the game, support will be added to the toolkit. See the Contribution setion below if you would like to help with the project.
Here's a quick screen shot:
Downloading
The BUI source code is available for download. The latest version of the code is available from the Subversion repository and some inevitably out of date version is available as a zip archive.| Documentation | online: API docs or downloadable: jme-bui-docs.zip |
| Binary | jme-bui.jar |
| Source |
The library is available in source code form via
Subversion:
|
| A zip file is also available: jme-bui.zip. |
BUI is released under the LGPL. The most recent version of the library should always be available at http://samskivert.com/code/jme-bui.
Building
Building BUI requires ant and an up-to-date build of JME. Place the JME and LWJGL jar files in thelib/ directory of the BUI source tree and run ant
dist to build the library.
Contribution
Contributions are welcome. Discussion generally takes place in the GUI forum of the JME website. Patches and enhancements can be discussed there and sent to mdb@samskivert.com for inclusion in the library.