Review of "LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers" by Packt Publishing [part 03 - first uses]

i,

So the last few days I have been struggling, not with LWUIT but with my health. But I made some progress.

As I stated last time, I think the book "LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers" is more of a reference than a tutorial and while working on the screens for our game, I found that this is true. I still need to download all source-code from the Packt Publishing site, but I think it is safe to say that I won't learn programming using LWUIT with this book.

The route I took is that I have the design of the screens I want to redo in LWUIT available as SVG screens (see for yourself at the left). Like I said before, the support for these SVG forms on my N95 and my N85 is disappointing to say the least, so we chose to use LWUIT instead.

I recreated the form in LWUIT as well as the code behind it, so the components on the form are bound to some attributes in the form. That all worked very nicely. (see at the right)
The book was very helpful in this perspective. It showed me very clearly how to create a form, use different layouts and how to add components to the form. The book doesn't degrade itself to a printout of the JavaDoc, it actually provides a very good mix of API and context.

But you should be aware that unless you know what you want and how it should look like, there's not really a point in opening the book.

As you can tell from the screenshots in this post, the screens have the same fields, but the design is completely different. Fortunately the book has quite a bit on the topic of themes and resources. That's my next mission; Figure out how I can make them look a like, meaning the LWUIT screen to look like the SVG screen. Expect to read about this in the next post.

Iwan