Hal Standalone and a Java gui

I've done some software in java, and i've created my own gui library with all the standard widgets and some special one (once you start..), and i.e. one thing I needed was the ability to change the opacity of the widgets, because I had a video stream as a background and the buttons and texts over. Other than this It was very simple to draw over the video stream in 3D, mixing on the same window 3D and 2D widgets..
It turned out a very useful and modern look software, and it took me little time to program.
Of course there are a lot of guis out there which are ready to be used, and wx and qt are ready with Hal widgets, but I cannot do those exotic things..
I'm sure many things i wrote are not optimized and can be slow, but when I try to replicate some of the things i need in python i get stuck with stupid things..
for example: which is the right library to draw a rectangle and then how to generate an event on mouse click inside that? it should be trivial, but it's hard!

In the meantime, while studying python, I'm digging into the kivy gui library, which seems fast, easy and modern too.

I very like the idea of java working together with hal services. Java offers the most freedom on UI and has a very clean event system.

But using Runtime.exec is the worst possibility for IPC.
Don't know enuf about NML, but I guess its based on shared memory. To use that, java needs a little help of C - just like Python does too. JNI is the right javatask for that.

one thing i've looked at is JNI , but then i couldn't find enough info on how to 'speak' to hal, or use NML. ..so i left that road..
if you know how, i'm still interested in this road.

Take a look at "src/emc/usr_intf/axis/extensions/emcmodule.cc" and there at emcSendCommand and emcWaitCommandComplete ...
Another directory, you should dig into is src/libnml ...

I guess, these both emc-functions is all you need to code in JNI - all other stuff could be coded in pure Java

Cheers Reinhard

thanks for addressing me.
i'll look into that in the next days.

Hi,

i have very little spare time actually, so it took a while.
But I succeeded in creating a java prototype that is able to print position - pretty easy

I started an axis linuxcnc and started the demo. Then I paused the execution and started the java app, which just printed the position. Then I compared the shown values. Looks good.
So I guess, I can implement the NML-layer for java apps

Cheers Reinhard

this is a nice project lots of people will love a boost to edingCNC users that are android Java CNC aplicants

any Images so far

That sound encouraging!