Friday, September 11, 2009

Review of "LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers" by Packt Publishing [part 01 - context]

Hi,



Yesterday I got my review copy of Packt Publishing's book on "LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers" and as promised before I'll post a review as I am reading and more accurately experiencing the book.

I'm currently working together with friends of mine on a free multi-player online realtime strategy game for mobiles. It's called IFF: Identification Friend or Foe and we're in a private beta stage. The reason why we're in private beta is that our sign-up screens in the client aren't working... on all phones. Our major concern while working on the game was related to screen resolution, since all manufacturers of phones have their own specific set of supported resolutions scaling is an important aspect of our GUI. Obviously the choice fell on SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics).
NetBeans has excellent support for SVG and really helps in designing SVG based UI's including forms. So we went working on it and within a few hours we had our prototype of the registration form, to be used in for signing up. All worked fine until we deployed the client to our Nokia phones. The SVG forms don't do well on an N95 or an N85. The actual game UI does excellent on these models but no chance for the forms. So I went installing various Nokia emulators on my Vista box and started debugging. As it turned out, the SVG support on Nokia devices is not to be used for forms, period.

Here comes LWUIT to the rescue... and together with it JavaME SDK 3.0. Marcel and I thought for a moment to do the UI ourselves, but after about 20 seconds we were convinced that it would turn out to be a LWUIT-like framework, so LWUIT it would be.
Around the same time I was approached by Packt Publishing asking if I was interested to review their book on LWUIT 1.1. So we waited to work on the forms in LWUIT until the book arrived and yesterday it did.

What you'll read in these series are my impressions on the book, the quality of the information in it, the usefulness of the book for somebody who knows Swing but not LWUIT and how the book relates to LWUIT 1.2, since that is what I will be using.

Iwan

2 comments:

Unknown said...

LWUIT only work for CLDC 1.1 but not CLDC 1.0, if you targeting larger user you should consider that CLDC 1.0 device is still in large amount out there.

I know this information quite too late when we just about launch our application, thats really bad situatation.

Shai Almog, one of LWUIT developer emphasis that LWUIT only targeting CLDC 1.1 device :D

Just my 2 cent, hope it will be usefull information for you :)

Unknown said...

Thanks for the info, but as we're also using SVG, we are not limited to CLDC 1.0. All SVG supporting phones have at least CLDC 1.1.

Iwan