Last Updated: 1 June 2008
Developing an application that has a sexy GUI is the hardest thing to do on J2ME. You may not believe as you have seen some great applications with good GUI. To name a few outstanding ones... Yahoo! Go, Opera Mini, Google Maps, etc... But these applications are not done easily. They have their own proprietary GUI library.
I have always been seeking for a good and free GUI library. But good things are seldom cheap. And cheap things are seldom complete. These are some better mentions:
- J2ME Polish - One of the earliest and most chosen one. Under Open Source GPL license. 990 Euro for a single application license.
- TinyLine 2D - SVG. Has evaluation license.
- J4ME - Open source, free, and in Google Code.
- LWUIT - Lightweight UI Toolkit, the Swing for mobile Java, a java.net project.
Good Blog with many J2ME resources/libraries:
Others - good but not very promising:
- Nextel - Good that it is open source. I referenced its code, and it is not better than j2mepolish.
- Synclast - Also referenced its code. But development halted.
- Twuik - Extremely expensive. I noticed its launch 1 year+ ago, but there is no progress since then...
7 comments:
You can also check out the Fire GUI library (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fire-j2me/)
LGPL licence and very active on development, recently released the v2.0 version.
LWUIT doesn't work right on the Blackberry. There is a Blackberry version of LWUIT, but that only removes a few classes.
It doesn't fix the text field at all, which is a fatal problem. Text fields are rife with errors and problems on the Blackberry in LWUIT.
Another library to mention here is J2ME GUI, available at http://www.garcer.com/. There's a free version available, as well as a licensed one for commercial applications. Works on a subscription basis, so you get free updates as well as free versions for a year. The difference is you may legally keep any versions you downloaded during your subscription period.
I also found one at http://flemil.com/ although it looks like its new and the licensing too was not so clear. Haven't tried it though
KUI UI library for J2me is simple
http://mulkan.web.ugm.ac.id
Here is another UI lib named TCUI (TomClaw User Interface). Looks and works nice.
Check source, demo and lib: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcui/files/
TCUI is good
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