UI-building alternative for added spiff

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UI-building alternative for added spiff

New postby Moochman on Tue Jun 23, 2009 6:28 pm

Hey,

Great article about how you built your program!

Just wanted to mention the possibility of "thinking outside the box" of the official BlackBerry SDK in order to get better visual results. Although I don't yet have any experience using them, I have read about and looked at a lot of the alternative UI toolkits for Java ME, and some of the interfaces created with them look totally sweet! You would probably not only be able to get better-looking results more easily by using the widgets they provide, you would also be one step closer to being able to port your program to non-BlackBerrys without worrying about the UI getting screwed up.

I'd say the top contender right now is LWUIT (Lightweight UI Toolkit), which is from Sun, and which I believe they are going to push into their official SDK sometime soon.
https://lwuit.dev.java.net/

But you might also want to check out this list:
http://javabyexample.wisdomplug.com/com ... 44/73.html

Cheers,
Mike
Moochman
 

Re: UI-building alternative for added spiff

New postby marwatk on Tue Jun 23, 2009 6:58 pm

Hi Mike,

Thanks!

I did contemplate using a generic toolkit, but there were a few reasons I opted not to:

A) I couldn't be sure of the quality of the code. I could spend a bunch of effort learning the toolkit only to have performance be sub-par
B) Since mine's a commercial app all the GPL stuff is out (and I'd be wary of LGPL even)
C) Most of the J2ME stuff isn't much better looking than what RIM provides as a base
D) While J2ME is good, I don't know how it will handle touch devices like the Storm

In the end I decided the risk of putting forth the effort to use a 3rd party lib only for it to not pan out was greater than the effort required to roll my own. I imagine the equation will vary for every, project though. (Another reason it would be great for RIM to just have a single solution to it).

Thanks for the links, though, I hadn't seen lwuit, I think I'll have to check that out.

-Marcus
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