LWUIT Now Open Source
I read the title of an article on The Register this morning ‘Sun opens Java tools in mobile fight back‘. What? I thought. All Java tools? Can’t be. The article starts…
"Sun Microsystems has open sourced its Java toolkit for building mobile applications just as the role Java plays on handsets comes into question."
It turns out that they are just talking about LWUIT (more of a library than ‘tools’). I have mentioned LWUIT several times (see below) and Sun has now finally fulfilled its promise to make this open source.
The source code can be found in the SVN repository. The LWUIT team have also set up an LWUIT incubator where you can share your changes to the code. The aim of the incubator is to facilitate…
"In order to become a LWUIT developer we would like to see some examples of your coding style and how you work with us."
I played with the LWUIT demo application a few weeks ago. It seemed to fulfil its goal of making Java ME UIs more graphically rich and easier to program. The only reservations I had were that the library is moderately large and that it was slightly slow (under S60 3rd).
The size of the library shouldn’t be that much of a problem if you are just targeting current rather than legacy phones. When I say ’slightly slow’, I mean there was a fraction of a second between asking the application to do something and the result being displayed. I suspect this has more to do with the Java runtime (which I previously had the pleasure of working on when I was freelancing at Symbian) than the LWUIT itself. Later S60 3rd devices have a new JVM that I suspect (I haven’t tried) will be more efficient.
Previously, you could only access and include the LWUIT binary which meant you were at the mercy of the LWUIT team in terms of fixing problems and extending the library. I suspect the open sourcing, under GPLv2 with the classpath exception, will make LWUIT much more acceptable for use in projects.
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