Pull Down to Refresh for LWUIT

Hi, all

I believe most of you here have heard about "Pull Down to Refresh" gesture. Shortly, it is a very used gesture on iOS apps, created by Loren Brichter, which users perform to refresh contents on the screen, just pulling down a list using the thumb.

So, now that you are contextualized about "Pull Down Refresh", I would like to inform that this famous gesture has just arrived to Java ME/LWUIT world.

Pull Down to Refresh for LWUIT was an old idea of mine, but just this week I sat down and decided to code a component that implemented this gesture. I was not sure whether it was going to work, but for my surprise it worked, and you will see how easy it is to get it integrated into your apps.

...
Form form = new Form("PullDownRefresh") {};
form.setLayout(new BorderLayout());
//
List list = new List(new String[] {...});
list.setRenderer(new DefaultListCellRenderer());
//
final PullDownRefresh refresher = new PullDownRefresh();
refresher.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent evt) {
        new Thread() {
            public void run() {
                // Perform some process
                //
                refresher.endRefreshing();
            }
        }.start();
    }
});
//
form.addComponent(BorderLayout.NORTH, refresher);
form.addComponent(BorderLayout.CENTER, list);
//
form.show();
...

As you can see in the code snippet above, all you have to do is to create an instance of PullDownRefresh class and add it at first position of a Form object and register an ActionListener object to be notified when a refresh operation is triggered. With this notification, you can start a process to perform any operation, e.g., refresh the Form's data. Once the operation is concluded, just call the endRefreshing() method, so the component can return to its default state. Easy, huh?

Watch the video below and see PullDownRefresh component in action:

Cool, huh? :)

PullDownRefresh component is totally customizable. For instance, you can change the style, images and labels. Check out the Javadoc and you will know how.

You can download the component right away by clicking here. Besides the source code, there is also sample MIDlet.

By the way, PullDownRefresh is under MIT license.

I hope everybody finds this new component useful and let me know your comments.

See you in the next post...

Update (Feb 17th, 2014):

There is a new version of this component. For further details, check this post.