Library or application for an interactive shell/console in Java Swing?

Question

I would like to let users use a Java application that normally runs interactively in the OS shell, taking input from stdin and responding with output to stdout. I would like to run this same class in an Swing window that resembles the terminal window: showing a prompt and whatever the user types should go to stdin of the class, then showing everything the class writes to stdout or stderr in the same window below. Also, as i the system shell, the input caret should stay in the position where the widow expects input and each input should be terminated by pressig ENTER.
How does one accomplish this in Java in the simplest way? Is there a library or open-source tool that provides this functionality?

Answer 1

johann_p wrote:
georgemc wrote:
Eclipse and NetBeans do this. You could dig out the source for either and have a look. It might be buried quite deep, though.Thank you for that pointer ... I have found a hint about this in Netbeans when I was googling, but that hint also contained a warning about a huge number of dependencies, which made me shy away from it. Well, you wouldn't need to take them all. IDEs are pretty modular.
If it exists, I'd rather go for a tool that comes as a single JAR :)It's really not all that big a deal to do. The reason you probably haven't found a library to do it is it's such a small task, and the majority of the work will be very specific to your app. It's really not much more involved than file I/O. Here's an idea: rather than worrying about re-inventing the wheel, why not just invent the wheel, and release it yourself, as an open-source library for others to use?
Eclipse to my knowledge does not use Swing but their own GUI toolkit, so that would probably introduce even more dependencies and possibly a different look-and-feel, no?Yes, that's true. More to the point, it introduces native dependencies, which complicates matters a bit.