java-gnome is a set of language bindings for the Java programming language for use in the GNOME desktop environment. It is part of the official GNOME language bindings suite and provides a set of libraries allowing developers to write programs for GNOME using Java and the GTK cross-platform widget toolkit.
Originally released on 8 October 1999 as version 0.2, it included the first bindings for Gnome and GTK. Until version 2.0, java-gnome was written by a group of online contributors. Development of this codebase by 5 successive teams continued up to version 2.16.2 supporting GTK 2.6, after which development ceased for several years, and was ultimately discontinued.
The current version, 4.0, was originally an internal project of , a change management consultancy group. The 2.0 and 4.0 versions have similar APIs, but specific names (of e.g. packages, classes, and methods) are different, and internal code in 4.0 is encapsulated and not externally visible.
The project is currently maintained by "java gnome Hackers". The leader of this latest team is , one of the principal architects for the java-gnome project.
Java-gnome provides access to various GNOME libraries using idiomatic class-based bindings. The provided libraries in version 4.0 include:
Java-gnome is only supported in Linux and Unix distributions, unlike most other GTK bindings that are supported by other operating systems. Distribution specific instructions are available for:
Semi-finished instructions are available for Open Solaris and Fedora Core Linux distributions.
Java-gnome is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.
To compile a java-gnome class, it is necessary to add the <code>gtk-4.1.jar</code> jar in the classpath. The jar is available on Debian (and all Debian-based distributions) in the <code>libjava-gnome-java</code> package, which can be found in the official repositories (the jar is installed under the <code>/usr/share/java</code> path).