The Java Curses Library is a library that makes is possible to create text- based terminal applications in the Java programming language, like curses under Unix. For this purpose a windowing toolkit is implemented, that, like AWT, consists of many classes for text based windows and GUI elements, that are layouted within these windows. An application,that bases on the library, creates one or more of this windows and reacts on events coming by user interactions with GUI elements.
The Java Curses Library consists of two parts: the plattform independent part, that contains Java classes, used writing applicatons and plattform dependent part, that consists of a native shared library making primitive input and output operations available to the first part. The first part comes as a jar file (jcurses.jar) the second part as a shared library ( libjcurses.so under Linux, libjcurses.dll under Win32 ). The Library is developed und tested with Linux und Windows 2000 und Windows 95, other UNIX plattforms must be easy to port, because the autoconf is used to create the makefile.
To use the library following is required: a) You must use JDK at or above 1.2 b) A curses implementation must be installed, if it is a UNIX OS c) The jcurses.jar must be in the CLASSPATH d) The shared library built by Java Curses must be in the same directory as jcurses.jar
The binary distribution comes already compiled for the specified plattform, it contains the library ( jcurses.jar and libjcurses.XXX ) in the lib directory and the Java documentation in the javadoc directory.
The Source distribution is to use under UNIX plattforms other as Linux. To compile the library following conditions are required:
- A JDK at or above version 1.2 must be installed and be in the PATH
- GCC must be installed and be in the PATH
Steps to compile the library:
- Change to the distribution directory
- ./configure
- make all (the default target is just to make the shared C library)
To use the compiled library see Installation.