Disclaimer

This is a fork of the archived gdx-lml project. It's meant to be compatible with the latest libGDX version, is currently in maintanance mode and there are no plans for further development.

You're welcome to submit bug issues and improvement PRs. Please be aware that feature requests most likely will be denied, unless they can really impress me 🙂

libGDX utilities

This repository contains various libGDX extensions covering various features such as dependency injection, GUI building, networking and general utilities.

Note

This repository originally used to host only the gdx-lml library repository. The other libraries were merged into a single Gradle setup to ease maintenance and releases.

If you came here looking for gdx-lml documentation, check this out. gdx-lml-tests project, which shows usage of all LML tags, was moved here.

Also, this repository includes example projects using the latest snapshot versions and their new features. Before including the libraries in your application, make sure that you're about to use the correct version.

Projects

gdx-kiwi

Kiwi is a Guava-inspired set of utilities for pretty much any libGDX-based application. It makes it easier to use libGDX collections, assets and its API in general. While there are no gdx-kiwi-specific test projects, most of examples use Kiwi utilities to handle heavy assets and collections.

gdx-lml

LML (libGDX Markup Language) allows to parse HTML-like templates with FreeMarker-inspired macros into Scene2D actors. Since making your UI in Java can become unreadable and tedious thanks to this language's verbosity, LML can be a useful alternative. Especially since LML templates can be modified or reloaded without having to recompile the whole application. Comes with extra support for managing preferences, assets and internationalization.

gdx-lml-vis

VisUI is a superb library, extending Scene2D with additional widgets and a modern skin. LML Vis allows to parse LML templates into VisUI widgets, instead of standard Scene2D ones and extends the syntax with ways to construct the new actors. Even if you want to have a custom skin in your application, consider using this library for the improved widgets.

gdx-autumn

Autumn is a dependency injection mechanism with component scanning. Using a set of annotations and class scanners, it allows you to build your application without singletons, global variables or even direct calls to constructors. Base for gdx-autumn-mvc framework.

gdx-autumn-android

Autumn Android provides class scanner for Android applications.

gdx-autumn-fcs

Autumn FCS provides class scanner for desktop applications using lightweight fast-classpath-scanner.

gdx-autumn-gwt

Autumn GWT provides class scanner for GWT applications.

gdx-autumn-mvc

Autumn MVC is a model-view-controller framework on top of libGDX. It uses Autumn to manage components and LML as view templates. Makes it easier to maintain assets, internationalization, preferences, music, screen transitions, and so on. While other libraries are rather general-purpose, this one forces its structure upon your application - but should be still worth it, considering the amount of things it handles for you.

gdx-websocket

libGDX web sockets library aims to extend the default Net implementations with cross-platform client-side web sockets. Rather than being a huge framework with server-side libraries, this set of libraries offers a simple and somewhat low level, yet pretty powerful client networking API.

gdx-websocket-common

Common web sockets library contains web socket natives for desktop and Android applications using high quality nv-websocket-client library.

gdx-websocket-gwt

GWT web sockets library contains web socket natives for GWT applications.

gdx-websocket-serialization

Serialization library for libGDX web sockets contains serialization mechanism that works on every libGDX platform. While default object serialization (using libGDX Json API, based on reflection) is fine for most project, some performance-critical applications might require a different solution. Since most popular and tested serialization libraries are rarely GWT-compatible, gdx-websocket comes with its own alternative - this library. Warning: JSON-based communication is much easier to use, switch to this serialization only when necessary.

Examples

See examples section to check out some simple applications using presented libraries.

Other projects

Other libGDX-related projects include:

gdx-setup: an alternative to the current project generator created using libGDX and Kotlin. Collaboration with @kotcrab.
ktx: utilities for libGDX application written in Kotlin. Features a VisUI module by @kotcrab.
gdx-skins: aims to help beginners with setting up their GUI in libGDX using Scene2D. Contains some free GUI themes.
Noise4J: a couple of simple map generators. Written with libGDX in mind, but the code itself has no dependencies - this is a pure Java 6 library, compatible with GWT. Lightweight. Can be used in pretty much any Java project.
vis-ui-contrib: contains some VisUI utilities and skins that I've created and made public. Note that the project itself in maintained by @kotcrab, the creator of VisUI.

Dependencies

All libraries follow the same schema:

api "com.crashinvaders.lml:lib-name:$libVersion.$gdxVersion"

lib-name is the name of the library (one of the ones listed above). libVersion follows MAJOR.MINOR schema and is the actual version of the library. gdxVersion is the version of the libGDX library used to build the archive. For example, this is a valid LML dependency:

api 'com.crashinvaders.lml:gdx-lml:1.10.1.12.0'

To find out the current version ID and GWT module, check out the specific library's README file. Looking through Maven Central might also help.

Working with the sources

Clone this repository. The whole setup is Gradle-based, with very similar structure to default libGDX projects generated with gdx-setup. Note that Gradle wrapper is not included in the root project, so you should have Gradle installed locally.

To deploy the libs, the project requires some additional "secret" properties, used for archives signing and logging to Maven Central. While most likely you will not need these functionalities, Gradle still forces you to provide these properties. A default unfilled gradle.properties file is available in the root folder, so Gradle will not complain about missing properties. However, eventually you might want to fill these in your Gradle home folder:

        signing.keyId= 
        signing.password= 
        signing.secretKeyRingFile= 

        ossrhUsername= 
        ossrhPassword=

Note that deploying to Maven Local does not require the signing task, so if you just keep the signing properties commented out - you should be fine. Try running gradle installAll to check if deploying to Maven Local works.

Before pulling any requests, make sure your code is formatted with eclipse-formatter.xml (or its equivalent for other IDE). Note that this is not the official libGDX code formatter, as I'm not really a huge fan of its setup.

Assuming you want to use Eclipse IDE (which is IMHO much better for managing multiple projects than IntelliJ thanks to its workspaces, working sets and whatnot), this is a simple list of stuff to do after repository cloning:

Make sure gradle is installed globally. This repository has no Gradle wrappers in any project, so you cannot just use ./gradlew.
Run gradle eclipse to generate Eclipse projects for core libraries.
Optional: cd examples and run gradle eclipseAll to generate Eclipse projects for all examples. Note that some tasks will fail to run; this is expected, as some examples have an Android project and require you to add local.properties file with sdk.dir property.
Open Eclipse IDE. Import existing projects. Make sure to turn on searching for nested ones.
Add eclipse-formatter.xml as Java code formatter. Make this the default formatter for the imported projects.

Useful Gradle tasks

gradle eclipse - generates Eclipse project structure.
gradle idea - generates IntelliJ project structure.
gradle build install - builds the libraries' archives and pushes them to Maven Local.
gradle installAll - same as the previous one, but the tasks are always invoked in the correct order. Use when changing libraries' versions to avoid missing artifacts errors.
gradle uploadArchives - pushes the archives to Maven Central. Requires proper gradle.properties with signing and logging data.
gradle clean - removes built archives.
gradle distZip - prepares a zip archive with all jars in build/distributions folder. Useful for releases.
gradle closeAndPromoteRepository - closes and promotes Nexus repository. Run after uploadArchives.

Additionally, in examples directory you can find a utility Gradle project. This is not the root project of example applications: they are all autonomous and can be copied outside the repository (and should still work!). Still, it contains some utility tasks that modify or test example projects en masse:

gradle updateVersion - copies gradle.properties from examples to all projects directories.
gradle eclipseAll - generates Eclipse project meta-data for all examples.
gradle runAll - starts each desktop application, one by one. Useful for quick testing. Some applications (web socket tests) might fail to run if their corresponding server application is not turned on - this is expected.
gradle cleanAll - cleans build directories of example projects.

To run a task on a specific library, proceed task name with its project ID. For example, gradle kiwi:build will build archives of Kiwi library.

crashinvaders/gdx-lml