BANGALORE, INDIA: Since the inception of J2ME, developers have been facing the problem of portability across devices for their application. It was because the interfaces for the applications would be rendered differently on different devices. Above that the UI classes in J2ME were basic and could not facilitate developers in creating rich and compelling interfaces.

The Light Weight User Interface Toolkit (LWUIT) is a UI library from Sun Microsystems that comes as a respite to J2ME developers as now they can have a tool to create interfaces that would be portable across different devices and rendered in a same manner.

About LWUIT
LWUIT is a compact API for creating attractive application user interfaces for mobile devices. It has always been a challenge for a developer to create rich cross device applications using J2ME, since every handset vendor has his own interpretation for the specs provided by Sun for J2ME classes. This has resulted in implementation differences of fonts, layout, menus, etc. for an application that made the application look and behave differently on different devices. This happened mostly for application interfaces on Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC)/ Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) based devices. The Lightweight UI Toolkit was developed to address these issues.

The Lightweight UI Toolkit makes it very easy to create richer UIs that look and behave the same on all devices using a programming paradigm similar to Swing. This Toolkit is able to run on CLDC1.1 MIDP2.0/CDC PBP/SE.

LWUIT provides features like screen transitions, themes, and richer looks to user interfaces that's based on Swing like model, which has several layouts, menus, animation and rendering effects along with event handling support. The toolkit also has a resource editor, which designers can use to design the look and feel of the interface. Also it can be used to design the themes for the device.