Chapter 1 tells you what LWUIT is all about and, broadly, how it operates. Starting with an overview of LWUIT which present the widgets and the functional features, this chapter goes on to discuss the basic architecture of LWUIT and ends with introductions to the two classes that are its foundations—LWUITImplementation and Display.

Chapter 2 lists the items that you will need to download and tells you where to find them. It prepares you for trying out the examples in the book and for creating your own applications by building a demo project. Next, you get to know the Component class, the component rendering process, and the Graphics class. Finally, this chapter lays the foundation for using Style and Animation with components.

Chapter 3 deals with the Container class, which is designed to be the holder of components. There are a number of descendants of Container—the Form, the Dialog, the Calendar and the TabbedPane. These classes also are discussed in detail with examples to show how they can be used in applications.

Chapter 4 covers Labels and the three components that are its descendants. These are the Button, the CheckBox and the RadioButton. RadioButtons exhibit special properties when they work with the ButtonGroup class and this aspect is demonstrated through an example. This chapter also takes a look at the Border class, which is used in the examples.

Chapter 5 demonstrates how flexible a List, and its subclass ComboBox, can be. This flexibility is shown through the examples that use custom renderers to enhance the appearance and functionality of lists and combo boxes.

Chapter 6 explores TextArea and TextField—the two classes that enable users to enter, display and edit text. A text field has the interesting property of in-place editing and this is treated in detail in this chapter.

Chapter 7 takes you through the various layout managers that arrange components on containers. There are six layout managers and the examples show the different ways in which these classes place components. The root of these six classes is the Layout class, which too is studied here.

Chapter 8 shows how custom components can be built. Building such a component involves not only visual aspects but also issues like styling, event handling and event generation. All of these topics are dealt with in this chapter through the examples.

Chapter 9 demonstrates how LWUIT handles various non-code elements that may be required by an application. Images, Fonts, and Animation Resources are examples of such elements. Resource files are used to package these elements and the Resources class provides the methods for extracting them from a resource file. The LWUIT bundle contains LWUIT Designer, which is a very convenient utility for creating resource files. This chapter examines how resource files are built and used.

Chapter 10 is about Themes. Themes are used to establish visual coherence through all the screens of an application. The LWUIT Designer is the tool that displays, edits and builds the themes that define how your applications will look. In this chapter, you will learn about themes, their usage and how they can be created.

Chapter 11 shows off two fascinating functionalities of LWUIT—Animations and Transitions. Animations involve repeated rendering on a component while Transitions determine the way in which a form is moved out of or brought into display. In this chapter, you will study these two features and see how to use them in actual applications. You will also see how to develop a custom transition which demonstrates the process of such customization.

Chapter 12 shows you how the Painter interface can be used to customize the appearance of a component’s background. This chapter also explains how a transparent or translucent layer (like a glass pane) can be placed over a form to implement interesting visual effects.

Chapter 13 covers two useful utilities that come with the LWUIT library. These are the Effects and the Log classes. The Effects class simulates the reflection of an image and appends the reflection to the original image. The Log class enables you to monitor at runtime the inner workings of the classes that you write. This can be a very effective debugging tool. This chapter demonstrates the use of Effects and Log classes. It also examines the structure of Log class through an example that builds its subclass to provide additional capabilities.

The following are required for this book:

The LWUIT bundle—this can be downloaded from https://lwuit.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList

A JDK. If you do not have one installed on your computer, you can get the latest version at http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

The Sprint Wireless Toolkit 3.3.2 which is available at http://developer.sprint.com/site/global/develop/technologies/java_me/p_java_me.jsp

This book is for Java ME developers who want to create compelling user interfaces for Java ME applications, and want to use LWUIT to make this happen.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code will be set as follows:

public class DemoForm extends MIDlet
{
public void startApp()
{
//initialize the LWUIT Display
//and register this MIDlet
Display.init(this);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be shown in bold:

public void destroyApp(boolean unconditional)
{
}
//act on the command
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae)

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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