LWUIT

LWUIT is a lightweight user interface toolkit from Sun, I mean, from Oracle. It was born from the area of user interfaces for mobile phones and is developed by Oracles team in Israel and is available to run on CLDC1.1 MIDP2.0/CDC PBP/SE, currently at version 1.3.

In 2009 Sun began to push LWUIT for DTV not just for mobile devices.



There is a lot of support for LWUIT on the internet including Shai's Java and LWUIT blog.
and even a book, but unfortunately for version 1.1.

LWUIT is a toolkit with an advanced widget set for user interface development. It is pretty and offers lots of features. The toolkit has a porting layer so that LWUIT can be placed on a variety of platforms.

LWUIT includes transitions such as slide and fade and animations from point to point with acceleration and deceleration if required. The platform can embed existing AWT based applications such as games and can handle video in widgets too. It is based on SWING design principles (such as model-view-controller) and the toolkit includes a designers tool to change the graphics.

However, the toolkit has come from a reduced screen size world and the full HD resolution of televisions may be a problem. Advice on writing efficient applications includes reducing transparency and keeping images small. This is worrying and although the demo is pretty it runs very slowly and largely shows a static demo with few animations or transitions.

What isn't so clear is how Oracle now position this against GRIN and Java-FX. Java-FX was previously said not to appear on set top boxes but now Oracle have retracted that. GRIN, a scene graph based graphics API, with a modern design philosophy compared to LWUIT (scripting, scene graph) that grew up in the DTV space seems to compete with LWUIT but with a lot less information and impetus behind it currently.

Normal Service Resuming

A few kind people have asked me why the blog has been inactive for a while. Nothings is wrong. Infact my employer simply had more of a share of my life than is normal for the last quarter. However, things are returning to normal and so I'm reactivating this blog. Thanks for your patience.