Aug 15, 2008

Swing on Java ME too?

Hi all,

It seems that some people have been worked hard to bring the Swing framework to Java ME platform. As I said in the last post, I am not that fan of projects like that, but this one seems to be good. Since it comes to improve the Java ME applications' user interfaces, which is very limited by LCDUI components.

The project's name is LWUIT, which stands for LightWeight User Interface Toolkit. This one was presented on Java One of this year to Java community. It is based on Swing framework, but all its components were designed and implemented carefully, so that they use as less memory as possible. What make all of them feasible for Java ME devices.

The main features of LWUIT are:
  • Layouts (FlowLayout, BorderLayout, BoxLayout and GridLayout)
  • Themes (Use of different themes)
  • Touch screen support
  • Integration with 3D elements
  • Animations and screen transition
  • I18n
  • Modal dialogs
This project is hosted on Java.net (see link below) under the GPL v2.0 license, which permits to create commercial applications and not to share the code, since you just include LWUIT's jar file. In the project's website, you will find many resources (e.g. binaries, javadocs, samples, tutorials, etc) to start to work with LWUIT.

https://lwuit.dev.java.net/

See you in the next post...

No comments: