Sun Open-Sources Java UI Toolkit

ruphus13 writes "As the mobile space heats up, Sun has released the source code for Java Lightweight UI Toolkit under the GPL v2 license. ZDNet quotes Sun's senior director of embedded software saying, '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.' Will Adobe follow suit?" Sun is also working on some fixes to holes in their mobile Java platform, which were discovered by a Polish researcher who demanded €20,000 to disclose the information.

Comments

And this is bad why???

[JamesP]

"which were discovered by a Polish researcher who demanded â20,000 to disclose the information. "

You know what??? GOOD FOR HIM.

So noone tought this would happen with lawsuit-happy, dig-your-head-in-the-sand companies (I'm not saying NOK and JAVA are)

Tips for dealing with large corporations, if you give it for free, the don't want it. If you put a price tag in it, you make it worth it.

Re:And this is bad why???

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what??? GOOD FOR HIM.

Who said it was a he?

The English language. References to persons of generic or indeterminate gender are properly phrased 'he'. Tortured phrasings such as '[s]he', 'he/she', and (the worst) alternating 'he' and 'she' when referencing the same speaker are recent innovations which solve a nonexistent problem.

Re:And this is bad why???

[mixnblend]

Where in the summary or in the article does it say that any of the authors thinks this is a bad thing? You imply it yourself but the sentence above reads,

"which were discovered by a Polish researcher who demanded Ã20,000 to disclose the information."

They are merely stating what occurred. Neither make a value judgement about his actions.

Re:And this is bad why???

[Pseudonym]

References to persons of generic or indeterminate gender are properly phrased 'he'.

This was true once. It was also once true that the second person singular pronoun was "thou". Neither is true any more.

If you don't like it, complain to your local linguist, who will be very happy to point out that languages are defined by usage, and language change is inevitable and unstoppable.

Re:Licence is GPL+Classpath Exception.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it actually gives developers more leeway in linking non-gpl modules in their project.

Re:LWUIT vs JavaFX vs Plasma

[digiti]

Well LWUIT could use the iPhone theme but then Sun would get sued. No point in deriding a technical project on the lack of a full time UI designer...
The text in the 3D cube in newer versions of LWUIT is anti-aliased, its still not as smooth as it can be but it runs on pretty much every phone out there.
Furthermore, it will look better with newer devices while still supporting existing 50$ phones.

Plasma, iPhone, Android etc. are all great but LWUIT runs today on a billion shipping phones... I doubt any of the above would ever make that number.

See some of the newer demos and videos here:
http://lwuit.blogspot.com/

Re:LWUIT vs JavaFX vs Plasma

[hey!]

Well, it reminds me of the reportedly apocryphal story of the exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill.

"Winston, you're drunk!" she is reported to have said. Churchill replied, "Yes, Madam, and you are ugly. But in the morning, I will be sober."

Of course, the joke is about the difference between temporary and permanent situations, and Churchill was semi-permanently drunk. In later years he used to do his morning's work in bed while he swilled a bottle of brandy.

The question with respect to the toolkit isn't whether it is visually ugly. That can probably be repaired. The question is whether it has ugly use patterns, which would be much harder to repair. In the next release, a visually ugly toolkit might not be ugly, but an awkward toolkit will probably remain so.

In any case, I've designed a number of mobile apps over the years, and every time I do one, the next one diverges more strongly from styles of interface I used to use on desktop applications. Mobile apps work benefit greatly from being radically streamlined. The biggest aesthetic problem with most desktop programs are clutter and complications; this problem is greatly amplified by the constraints of mobile apps.

It follows that a well designed mobile app should be pared to the bone. While it is still possible to have bits of ugliness, like really bad font rendering, a streamlined interface has much less scope for ugliness.

Some of the demo LWUIT screenshots are supposed to show as many of the toolkit's features as possible. Any actual app that looked that way would be really badly designed. That's all too common of course, but there isn't any system I can think of that is both general purpose and can't be used to create ugliness.

interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Before Sun was into java, they teamed up with NeXT to create the OpenStep specification. sun had a beta Openstep package for solaris (sparc only) but then got java fever. Many of the original Java classes bore a striking resemblance to the Foundation Kit. It's been downhill since.

Sun's track record at designing good toolkits is like Han's reiser's track record of not murdering his wives, or Cowboy neal's track record of not being fat.

Jambi

[Brandybuck]

What about Jambi? Qt for Java. High quality easy to use UI framework. Yeah, I know it's Nokia now, but so what.