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Home > Front End Hitting Excellence (FEtHEr)

Introduction

FEtHEr is a cross-platform library for creating first-class, native-first applications as well as games using the native UI tools of the platform in conjunction with a Java core (which itself can optionally have its own C core). The objective is to write the core or game once, tailor the UI to each platform if applicable, and run on many. For now, desktop and mobile.

FEtHEr logo

The Front End Hitting Excellence (FEtHEr) project is in its early design and implementation phase.

Motivation

I got tired of the poor user experience of generic cross-platform UI frameworks and embedded Web views. Electron applications often feel heavy and resource-intensive, not to mention they have HTML/CSS UI and require a scripting language, while cross-platform toolkits like React Native also requires a scripting language and encourages targeting the lowest common denominator. Flutter feels like the new Java Swing, but with Dart. Better, but still pretty generic. I throw darts and exceptions, but very selectively. That's why I decided to start up something new, and address that space.

Additionally, the Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) targets all major desktop operating systems, but there is nothing for mobile there without using a heavy framework. So, I wanted to keep with the library philosophy and fill that gap.

Components will include templates (the example host applications), FEtHEr libraries, and example core apps.

When combined with templates, you can get a project going pretty quickly and customize it for each platform as you see fit. Watch this space for updates.

Example host GitHub repositories (unreleased)

Further information