Sexy UIs are all the rage today, right? FlashLite apps, WRT Widgets, WidSets, all of them have distinctive user experiences which differ greatly from the way we interact with native S40 and S60 applications. More colors, more animations, better usability, all making up a great way for developers to differentiate their applications and make them more attractive to the end user.

In Java MIDlets however, you are stuck with a very poor UI toolkit, the LCDUI, which has very few components and few options on how to alter their appearance; most of the time you're giving hints to the underlying implementation regarding the way you want the components to be displayed. Even if you do so, however, there's still a big chance your hints will be ignored and the UI will be rendered differently on each device. This can be a pain if you are developing for many different phones, with different screen sizes, input methods and form factors. Actually, to be fair, this can be a pain even if your target is a single device.

To circumvent these challenges, developers had either to developer their own UI toolkits, based on raw Canvasses, or use a 3rd. party toolkit such as J2ME Polish, which is great but requires a paid license to develop commercial applications, and this can be an unbearable cost to a small developer.

Searching the web and some mailing lists, I found this very interesting project, called LTWUI (Lightweight UI Toolkit), which is a cross-device UI toolkit created to provide developers with the possibility of developing compelling user interfaces without writing painful low-level Canvas code. It's based on Swing programming paradigm and it's key functionalities are:

 LWTUI demo midlet running on E61i

• Swing Like MVC
• Layouts
• PLAF & Themes
• Fonts
• Touch Screen
• Animations & Transitions
• Rich widgets
• 3D Integration
• Painters
• Modal Dialogs
• External Tools
• I18N/L10N

It's still in Early Access release but you can go to the project page and download it so you can play around with the toolkit and run its demos on emulators and real devices. The great thing is that the library is released under the Sun Licensing Agreement (SLA) which makes it usable by commercial applications without having to pay any fee. 

I ran the LWTUIDemo midlet on my Nokia E61i and N95 and it worked beautifully. It's a bit slow though, but nothing that compromises the user experience. I recorded a video of LWTUI running on my N95, so you can see what's up for use in your Java apps; I guarantee you will enjoy it.

Last but not least, the project is open source, so you can contribute to it, just go to the project page for more details on how to participate.

Here's the video, enjoy it:

[]s
Daniel