The bsh.util.JConsole is a light weight graphical shell console window, with simple command editing and history capabilities. BeanShell uses the JConsole for the GUI desktop mode again in the JRemoteApplet for the remote server mode.

You can use the JConsole to provide an interactive BeanShell prompt in your own applications. You are free to use the JConsole for your own purposes outside of BeanShell as well! It is a fairly generic shell window easily attached to any kind of streams or through the simple console interface.

JConsole is a Swing component. Embed it in your application as you would any other swing component. For example:

JConsole console = new JConsole();
myPanel.add(console);

You can connect an Interpreter to the console by specifying it in the Interpreter constructor, like so:

Interpreter interpreter = new Interpreter( console );
new Thread( interpreter ).start(); // start a thread to call the run() method

Or you can connect the JConsole to the Interpreter directly with Interpreter setConsole().

For external use, JConsole can supply a PrintWriter through its getOut() method and has a full suite of direct print() methods.

Tip: When interacting with any Swing component from outside the Java event handling thread, use the Swing thread safety facilities: SwingUtilities.invokeNow() and invokeLater().

JConsole implements the bsh.ConsoleInterface interface, which defines how the Interpreter interacts with a console object. To the interpreter a console is simply a set of I/O streams with some optimized print methods:

Any object that implements this interface can be attached to the Interpreter as a GUI console.

The bsh.util.GUIConsoleInterface extends the ConsoleInterface and adds methods for printing a string with a color attribute, supplying wait feedback (the wait cursor) and name completion support. JConsole implements this interface and it is used indirectly via BeanShell commands when it is detected.

The bsh.util.AWTConsole is a legacy implementation of the GUI Console using AWT instead of Swing. This console does work, but it is not as slick or pretty as the JConsole. The primary reason it is still here is to support remote access from generic web browsers using only Java 1.1.