Design a GUI for a J2ME app

Question

How do I create a J2ME app for cellphones with a GUI similar to the menus you see in Java games? I\'ve tried MIDlets with Netbeans but they only show you one GUI element at a ti

Answer 1

If you are familiar with web stuffs then you can use KUIX (kalmeo.org/home/index) framework having xml and css supports. In place of It you can use also Polish framework (www.j2mepolish.org) it's also uses the xml in easy way rather than kalmeo kuix framework.

Answer 2

It's way too cumbersome to write your own GUI, especially since there are so many available these days. If you're familiar with desktop development in VB.Net and C#, you might find "J2ME GUI" easy to use. You can download it from http://www.garcer.com/. It has a similar feel and makes it easy to learn. This is the kind of GUI that I expected to come standard with MIDP2 when I started mobile development. Would have solved a lot of issues.

Answer 3

Links to many j2me GUI libraries: link1, link2

I know that kuix is not bad and free - watch demo.
But i prefer to make my own gui elements - this is much more flexible (but takes some time).

As for IDE - you may want to make some kind of gui-editor tool, construct interface in it, save result to some file, and read it from your app.

Answer 4

Try to use LWUIT - nice UI toolkit for j2me: https://lwuit.dev.java.net/ http://lwuit.blogspot.com/

Answer 5

You can also use minime: http://code.google.com/p/minime/ It's an open source GUI library for j2me. miniME works on canvas level (lowest level in j2me) to draw every control so your UI will look exactly the same whatever the handset it'll be running on. Other advantage are: - miniME uses its own event loop to manage user controlled event (botton pressed, softbar, ..), so you Application will "behave" the same whatever the handset. - miniME support the concept of Views and stack of view, in order to make navigation between different view/screens very easy.

Here is an example: A View is what you have on the screen at a given moment (for example the main menu screen), then to go to a sub menu, you create a new view, and by calling a simple API, you push it in the stack of Views. The previous view (the main menu) is still existing, but inactive. When the sub menu view complete his work (for example, user press back, or do a selection), you can just go back to the previous view by calling a pop api.

Answer 6

I can't comment on which IDE to use - but I do know that to create custom UI (like the ones you see in J2ME games), you have to explicitly draw the GUI controls.

Beware that you may need to customize the GUI depending on the target phones. You have to cater for different screen sizes, key pad configurations, default theme etc. This would probably mean that you need different builds for things like different screen sizes which would drive up your Java Verified certification costs (if you need it).

You may be able to find a set of nice looking UI controls that you can buy online and use (try J2ME Polish). The easy way out of course, is to use default J2ME controls :)