What is a good API to write tools with. Such as a paint application? I am using Debian Linux, with Eclipse and I am looking for my first couple of projects to be tools I would use in game development, further down the line. As a paint application, I mean to write something like mtpaint or similar, in Java. I have some programming background, so I am going through some accelerated learning to get up to speed with Java. I have some experience with graphics, but not too much. Any advice would be nice.
Hi
Have you ever looked at Paint.JAVA?
Actually, you can use any decent Java UI API to do this, even Swing and OpenJFX/JavaFX. Twelve Monkeys is useful to support image formats not supported by Swing. If you need an AWT-free solution to read and write images, some utilities in JOGL allow to do that for PNG (read/write) and JPEG (read).
You’re going to have to be much more specific than this. There is no catch-all API for writing tools.
You have to break your problem down into smaller steps and then focus on only one of those steps at a time. Which part are you working on? Is it the core painting part? The GUI around the painting part? Data storage? If you haven’t broken down your problem into smaller steps like this, then that’s your first step.
Like gouessej said, you can probably just use core Java and Swing or JavaFX, without any external libraries.
I’ll also mention a library / language called Processing, which makes it easy to create visual and animated programs without a ton of boilerplate code. If you’re just starting out, it’s a great language to use for learning the basics.
+1 to Processing as a great API for learning Java. However, I wish we could get out of this mindset of calling it a language - it has a couple of very questionable hacky syntax changes that just end up causing headaches.
Oh, and (well, it is a thread about making tools! :persecutioncomplex: ) come and have a play with Praxis LIVE, which provides a live/interactive coding environment for Java and happens to ship with the Processing libs included. ;D