Want a sexy UI in your Java MIDlet? It's now possible with LWTUI! (with video)

dcrocha — Wed, 14 May 2008 22:23:39 +0000

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

A little bit of hot Java

dcrocha — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:36:34 +0000

Pretty interesting document posted by Aleksi Uotila on the S60 Java blog, containing a PDF document about S60 3.2's eSWT plug-in for Java applications. I have been using this toolkit's desktop version for years and I must say I have never looked back to Swing or AWT, so I really hope there's more development on this side for mobile devices, since innovation on Java platform has been a bit slow these days, partly due to the JCP process and everything.

Here are some screenshots of how eSWT apps look like:

Direct link to the article here.

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After Carbide.j's demise, I have been working hard to get used to the other toolsets in the market. Adaptation to NetBeans Mobility Pack was pretty swift, but I can't say the same about EclipseME, since I had many conflicts with my version of Eclipse, but thanks to Leisti's article on Wikipedia I finally got what works with what then my setup is now running smoothly, and I'm a big fan of C-like macro preprocessing, which helps a lot in reducing the problems of device fragmentation. EclipseME, as well as NetBeans, have this feature and I love it, specially when dealing with "new" APIs not available across S40 and S60 (Location API, do you hear me?) and also with the (too) highly modular Mobile Media API.

<code>
// #ifdef DEBUG
System.out.println("Some debug output");
// #endif
...
</code>

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Speaking of fragmentation, the other day I was checking my GMail account and I came across an ad for Tira Jump 2008. For those who don't know it, Jump is a tool to facilitate application deployment across mobile devices, so you don't have to do it manually. I saw a presentation by these guys at JavaOne 2005 and was pretty impressed when they created a MIDlet game which could run on 120 devices almost automatically. Today they claim support to 1200 device models, which is quite a number! They have a free version of the tool that you can use to test the product and deploy your midlet in up to 12 different models. I'll give it a try later.

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Why so much JAVA? I'm writing some chapters of an upcoming Java book for a well-known editor, so I have been thinking in Java instead of Portuguese for the past two weeks, and it's been fun.

Speaking of Portuguese, my native language, the "hot java" joke never made any sense to us, since we don't call our coffee "Java", but I nevertheless inserted throughout the post just to please our English-speaking readers :)

Daniel Rocha's Forum Nokia Blog

Want a sexy UI in your Java MIDlet? It's now possible with LWTUI! (with video)

A little bit of hot Java