In the jingle jangle JVM I’ll come followin’ you

Text-based user interfaces (TUIs) have been experiencing an impressive revival since the emergence of tools such as OpenCode, Claude Code, and other AI-supported development tools.
Until now, Python and Rust frameworks such as Textual and Ratatui have dominated this field.
In the Java world, Picocli is a powerful framework for building CLI applications, but a suitable framework for building TUIs has been lacking until now.

However, since early 2026, TamboUI has been available, a framework based on Ratatui and Textual for building modern TUIs with Java (or Kotlin) that are in no way inferior to their role models in terms of speed, features, and convenience.

In this presentation, we will take a look at the basic concepts of TamboUI and how to build your first applications using the declarative API.
Look forward to a TUI version of your favorite starter websites, a small RSS feed reader and a simple chat client with Ollama and LangChain4J.