Introducing a Lightweight UI Toolkit: Bringing Desktop Development into Java ME

July 17, 2008
By Ibon Urrutia

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Please, feel free to open weather.res file in your Resource Editor and play with different combinations of colors, fonts, and images. Maybe some of you wonder why I have included all the images inside the resource file instead of downloading them (the RSS feed has some image URLs). Basically, I did this for two reasons: to show you how to include images, and secondly, some mobile operators control how much bandwidth is used by customers, and I wanted to consume the minimum possible.

Conclusion

You have learned the basics of LWUIT: using containers and forms and placing components on them following a layout. You also started to empower your application with themes, fonts, and images. In the next article, I will show you some advanced concepts, such as Lists, dialogs, tabs, and animations.

Download the Code

You can download the code that accompanies this article here.

References

[1] LWUIT home: https://lwuit.dev.java.net/
[2] Yahoo Weather: http://weather.yahoo.com/
[3] Yahoo RSS Weather description: http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/
[4] Nice weather icon images (for a KDE application): http://liquidweather.net/icons.php
[5] What is Java 2 Micro Edition? by Eric Giguère: http://www.developer.com/ws/j2me/article.php/1378921
[6] KXML home: http://kxml.sourceforge.net/
[7] First of a series of articles teaching JavaME: http://www.developer.com/java/other/article.php/3747896
[8] Composite pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_pattern

About the Author

Ibon Urrutia is a Spanish IT Engineer, with wide experience in JavaME applications targeted to be used in many devices. Nowadays, he is working for MDTEC http://www.mdtec.net, participating in a complete JavaME framework with advanced user interface functionalities, TagsME^TM, http://www.tagsme.com. He also is member of Netbeans Dream Team, http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetBeansDreamTeam.

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