I'm quite familiar with Java and I would like to work on a project on my free time but for some reason, I just hate having to work with Java GUIs. I'm wondering what kind of Java technologies are available out there that I can use for starting a non-GUI project.
Thank you.
SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit
SWT is an open source widget toolkit for Java designed to provide efficient, portable access to the user-interface facilities of the operating systems on which it is implemented.
If your project is going to use a GUI you can use JavaFX for the view and use pure Java for the logic
You can also use FendGUI which includes: buttons, sliders, trees, text areas, frames, tabs, etc.
If you deploy on the web, there's JSP. You can use Flex and Blaze DS as well.
SWT is a popular GUI library (used in projects such as Eclipse IDE and other standalone projects) which uses native windowing components such as Win32 on Windows and GTK+ on Linux. It achieves this through an abstraction layer with a standard library available for supported platforms. http://www.eclipse.org/swt/
For non-UI stuff (which the OP seems to be requesting now), there's CHARVA, which is a Java framework for presenting a "graphical" user interface, composed of elements such as windows, dialogs, menus, textfields and buttons, on a traditional character-cell ASCII terminal.
CHARVA screenshots:
You can try google web toolkit (GWT). And the ExtGWT lib is also an try worth.
There's nothing wrong with CLI (command-line interface) apps, especially if the project is just for your own use. I like to prototype all my Java projects with CLI's first, because they're flexible and easy, and only once I've got things working do I consider adding a GUI.
Maybe have a look at Griffon for a groovier experience (and if appropriate for your application).
Java Curses: http://sourceforge.net/projects/javacurses/
The Java Curses Library (JCurses) is library for developing text terminal based applications using Java programming language. It is implemented as a Windowing toolkit similar to AWT, but built upon the UNIX "curses" windowing system.