Command Line Input in Java

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Today, someone introduced me to Spring Roo, which has quite some similarities with XINS at first glance. I really like the command line shell interface Roo has, featuring unbuffered text input, completion and fancy colors. I know it’s not even close to a rich IDE like NetBeans or Eclipse, but I love command line tools for their productivity and simpicity.

Looking at some documentation, the text-based shell interface is implemented using these technologies:

• JLine – Library for handling console from Java, unbuffered.
• JAnsi – Library for using ANSI escape sequences to format console output.
• JNA – Windows-specific library for displaying colored output on Windows-systems.

Both libraries work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/UNIX-systems. Definitely worth considering in case you want to implement a console application in Java.

PS. Upon further inspection, Roo is very different from XINS, though. Roo is an aspect-oriented build-time code generator/manager that generates JSPs, Spring code, Java plumbing code (such as toString() methods), while XINS is an RPC-oriented component technology framework that also has (optional) runtime components (both client- and server-side, if you wish).

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>Combining XINS and SWF?

>While listening to a Java Posse podcast episode 91, Spring Web Flow (SWF) was mentioned. SWF apparently integrates not only with Spring MVC, but also with Struts, JSF and Portlets. Makes me wonder whether I can use it in combination with XINS as well.

I like XINS a lot, but the support for web applications (the so called XINS Front-end Framework) lacks some features I will want to see, such as:

• externalized interaction design
• resource-style URLs, e.g. http://host/answers instead of http://host/?command=Answers
• separated configuration file, so the standard runtime configuration file does not get cluttered

To be investigated…