Hey everyone. I've been using straight lwjgl to build my games, but keep hearing about jME. I've had to build all my own stuff (like object loaders, ogg sound engines, etc.), but as I tell people at my work: Why reinvent the wheel? So, I just have some questions before I start retooling my code:
How hard is jME to pick up?
How stable is jME right now?
How active is the jME project? (I noticed there hasn't been any news for a few months)
How mature is jME?
And finally, are there any released games out there that use jME that I could take a look at?
Thanks!
If anything, jME isn't hard to pick up. A basic knowledge of OpenGL makes things somewhat easier, but I know for a fact many of the people that start using jME don't have that. With your LWJGL experience, you should have no trouble with this.
I don't think you should take news a sign of activity. It's better to look at the forums, and CVS activity: https://jme.dev.java.net/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=cvs . In fact the biggest news recently isn't even mentioned… if you read the forum, or the blogs of Mark and Joshua linked on the main page, you'll find out what it is 
As for stability and maturity, that's in the eye of the beholder… it's not "1.0", but over the last half year there has been a lot of activity that resulted in a lot better performance and stability. Sure, there are still bugs being found every now and then, but I think that's mostly a sign of an active user community. If there are any weak areas I can think of, it'd be sound (it could be a bit better). Also don't expect jME to just load any kind of model you throw at it (but which engine does?).
The strong point of jME is it's easy of use, both as a user of the engine as for developing the engine itself. There are lots of little methods and classes to make life a bit easier (eg. for maths and such), and it's easy to add new features (eg. with the renderpass system that was recently added). The API makes you feel like you're programming with Java (eg. you can even use Swing as your GUI inside your game), not C functions with Java syntax.
As for games, you could look at Furballz (there's a link to a development log on the mainpage) as an example of quickly making something with jME.
jSumo is a fun little physics game: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=2205.0
A recent game I find very addicting myself: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/jmeforum/index.php?topic=2831.0 (still has some bugs though).
Very exciting stuff. Of course, it might be hard to give up my OpenGL programming.
Well. Don't give up yet…
It's easy to use LWJGL directly from jME. If you already have some useful code maybe you can port it to jME.
How do we contribute? Not that I know jME very well yet, but it looks like I could probably add some of my enhancements for .OBJ parsing and my truetype font rendering object. I'd have to figure out how to implement them into your architecture first, but I think it might be useful.
(And yes, I was just kidding about giving up OpenGL… I don't think I could ever leave it - I've spent too much time learning it… but I am very serious about using jME and being a contributer rather than just a user. I feel that a pooled knowledge project is greater than what any single person can accomplish on their own.)
Normally through the forum… if you start doing things that are easier with CVS access, then that's not out of the question either. (disclaimer: I don't decide that though… :D)
Don't believe llama. Behind every great monkey there's a llama making all the decisions. :-p
There are several people here (including myself) that would love to get truetype font rendering into jME so please get that code posted. :-p
darkfrog
Ok… just give me time to learn jME's architecture so I can port it correctly…
and then, of course, there's working with that darkfrog guy to get JGN working for me too.
JME tends to have times with more and times with less activity. Don't take no news for several months of inactivity as a sine of death.
I'm noticing that a lot of the people who frequent this project happen to be the same people I see over at the JGN and LWJGL projects too. That makes me feel pretty comfortable, and in a way, right at home. 
Well, there are fewer people currently at JGN than I'd like, but it's slowly growing, and it's an extremely new project in comparison to jME and LWJGL but hopefully shows as much promise.
I blame these slackers here primarily for the lack of activity on JGN. :-p
darkfrog