Last week, I commented on how Sony Ericsson’s Project Capuchin might help solve the problem of creating a great UI without resorting to writing your own UI layer on the Java ME canvas.

Well, Sun has also been working on a solution…

"Writing appealing cross device applications today in the Java™ ME platform is challenging. Due to implementation differences in fonts, layout, menus, etc. the same application may look and behave very differently on different devices. In addition much of the advanced UI functionality is not accessible in LCDUI and requires the developer to write very low level "paint" type code. Based on our real world experience with these issues in creating Java ME UI applications over the past 5 years we created the Lightweight UI Toolkit to address these issues. The Lightweight UI Toolkit makes it very easy to create compelling UI’’s that will look and behave the same on all devices using a programming paradigm similar to Swing"

The toolkit not only provides forms and the associated controls but also provides themes, transitions and animations. 

You can find out more about the Lightweight UI Toolkit on Java.net. It’s binary only at the moment but source code will be available soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:44 am and is filed under Mobile, J2ME. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.