I see. How is Slick2D?
I've been dabbling with lwjgl and slick2d lately. For lwjgl it' basically the same thing as writing opengl code for C++. Slick2D is written on top of lwjgl and provides a nice way to create 2D games. From what I can tell Slick2D is a pretty damn good library. Another library you might want to look into is TWL for creating some GUI elements.