Sun open sources Mobile toolkit LWUIT

BANGALORE, INDIA: Sun Microsystems has released the source code for its implementation of the Java-based light-weight UI toolkit (LWUIT) for mobile UI development to the java.net community.

LWUIT is an advanced UI library that enables rapid development of mobile applications that will run consistently across Java ME enabled devices. It includes a full set of ready-made graphical components, as well as sophisticated support for themes, fonts, animation and transition effects.

Craig Gering, senior director of Embedded Java Software at Sun said: "By creating LWUIT, Sun is reaffirming its commitment to the mobile development community and by open sourcing the LWUIT code, we are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications - functionality that they have been requesting for some time.  This software will also help address the mobile industry's fragmentation issue by enabling developers to create a single interface that will work anywhere Java is found."

LWUIT provides sophisticated Swing-like capabilities without the tremendous power and complexity of Swing. Designed from the ground up as an efficient mobile user interface toolkit, LWUIT provides many useful Swing-like features. In addition, it offers a basic set of components, flexible layouts, style and theming, animated screen transitions, and a simple and useful event handling mechanism. The toolkit has been tested and debugged on a variety of mobile devices.

Shai Almog, senior engineer, Sun Microsystems says in his blog: "I think Swing developers will find LWUIT very interesting since it goes places Swing can't go and picked up lots of ideas from Swings experience. I also assume many Swing developers are peeking towards the mobile space and its rapid growth thinking about making the leap, LWUIT is ideal for those guys and hopefully this presentation will get you going."

The tool is released under the GPLv2 w/Classpath Exception license.