Kuix: Seems to be cool!

Hi all,

Last week, during a discussion about touch apps in our group on LinkedIn, one of the participants suggested a UI framework which I was not aware of its existence. I got interested and decided to take a look. Particularly, I am a big fan UI frameworks, although I think we dispend too much effort building them, since Java ME could already provide this to us. Whatever!

The framework mentioned was Kuix Project. This project is maintained by KALMEO Community Portal, which is supported by KALMEO. According to the website, "Kuix is an extensible and fully customizable JavaME UI framework that enables high end application development.".

In general, Kuix provides the same as most UI frameworks, e.g., LWUIT. In Kuix, you will find a good set of customizable UI components, called widgets, e.g., button, checkbox, radiobutton, textbox, etc; touch ready, i18n support and layout oriented, etc. In addition, the developer can use both Java code or XML to define a screen. CSS can also be used to customize colors, fonts, borders, etc. J2ME Polish implements the same thing. Anyway, nice approach!

The framework is quite easy to use, since it is very familiar with LCDUI. See below a snippet:

// create a displayable Screen object
Screen screen = new Screen();
// create a Text widget to show some basic text
Text text = new Text();
// set the Text of your object to "Hello World!"
text.setText("Hello World!");
// add the text to the screen
screen.add(text);
// set the application current screen
screen.setCurrent();

Another interesting feature of Kuix is Dynamic Data Display. It provides the ability to bind a ui component to a data provider in order to allow a dynamic data loading.

Kuix seems to be a good alternative to LWUIT, for instance, since it is smaller and straightforward but still with good features. Kuix is distributed under GPL license. However, for commercial applications you need to a buy a commercial licence, which costs €199.00.

Kuix's website provides a very good documentation so that you get started. It is worth a shot.

See you in the next post...