LWUIT - A J2ME UI Toolkit

Light Weight User Interface Tool (simply LWUIT pronounce as loo-it) is a savior for J2ME mobile applications as far as supporting multiple devices is concerned. As we all know, new devices getting launched quiet frequently and modifying our J2ME based applications to suit these devices is a nightmare.

LWUIT is an Open Source initiative from SUN and 1.2 version got released last month. You can download it from https://lwuit.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=0.
LWUIT can be considered as a subset of SWING framework without the power and complexity of it. It offers the following key features to simplify the User Interface development.
1) Flexible Layouts
2) Basic set of Components
3) Style & Themes
4) Animated screens
5) Event handling mechanism
6) Touch screen support
7) Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N)

LWUIT applications have been tested on these Mobile manufacturer devices.
1) Sprint
2) Nokia
3) Sony Ericsson
4) Motorola
5) PhoneME
6) BlackBerry (Reported some issues initially and recommended to run the LWUIT application on a separate thread)



The above picture is from SUN tech days presentation and I feel no further explanation is required.

The world is “Mobiling” and majority of the new applications require “Mobility”. Unless we have a single tool(s) / platform(s) which cater for most of the mobile devices, it is hard to achieve the Mobility of your existing or new applications. I strongly believe and anticipate this unique tool, and LWUIT is just a beginning.