LWUIT supports such nice things like theming, transitions and animation. It also includes new UI components like TabbedPane and Dialogs.

I just got a new book to review, LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers, written by Biswajit Sarkar. If you think that LWUIT could scratch your itch then I’d recommend on having this book on your desk as it works pretty nicely as a reference as well as good introduction to the whole library.

Book contains lots of emulator screenshots which help to understand the concepts very well. This combined with lots of sample code makes it really easy to learn all features of LWUIT library. Only one oddity is that it’s referencing to Sprint SDK where it could as well be the Sun’s original WTK but that doesn’t really have any affect on code samples.

Book’s first chapter is a good introduction to the library. The following chapters explain the default components and then there is one chapter on how to create a custom component. Last chapters dig into resources, LWUIT designer, themes, animations and transitions, painters, effects and logging. The index is also very complete which makes the book work well as a good resource in the bookshelf even after the first reading.

Check out the publisher site for more information about the book.

I have already created a project for the Car Manager application and I have imported the latest source code to Google’s Subversion repository. The project home page’s user interface is very simple and doesn’t feel as “heavy” as SourceForge’s UI, which is a good thing. The issue management system looks very simple but it contains bunch of AJAX code that makes it very easy and also very powerful to use. I’m still going to make a separate project page to my blog for screenshots and downloads. I’m using the Google’s service only for version control and managing project issues.Православни икони

What’s new in Mobility Pack 5.0:

• Improved Wireless Connection Bridge – easily access web services and other server-side data from MIDlets via servlets. The bridge now supports complex types.
• Support for Java ME Web Services (JSR 172) – Write applications that access web services directly from your phone.
• New custom components in the Visual Mobile Designer – New components enable you to add tables, wait screens, and splash screens to your user interface.
• Improved preprocessor support for device fragmentation – Develop code for any number of devices with a single code base. You can also import projects from Antenna and J2MEPolish without losing your preprocessor coding.
• Edit generated code – Guarded blocks are now more flexible, enabling you to customize code generated by the Visual Mobile Designer.
• Improved emulator support – You can now easily add custom emulators to the IDE.

As you can see from the screenshot that I have already tested the new beta release. New custom components are good addition since I have created my own splash screen for every application that I have made. Now I’m able to use only the Visual Mobile Designer to design my application’s flow and screens. This reduces the testing time and produces more stable applications.

The SMS support brings great possibilities for mobile applications. It allows easy system integration and communication between two phones. It allows for example to use existing SMS gateway systems as an integration tool for between company’s internal system and mobile applications. SMS gateway systems also usually include functional invoicing framework so it can also be used as a great alternative for billing your mobile application users (eg. monthly fee). SMS messages could also be used to create a multiplayer games that would communicate game statuses and turns via SMS.

The apps for phones Basic language support points out how different approach the apps for phones team have taken. They have really thought out of the box as they have succesfully implemented a basic language to “Java” application development tool. The basic language’s syntax seems to be quite identical to Microsoft Visual Basic so it is very easy to write and many developers already are very familiar with the language so this reduces the development time for people that aren’t familiar with Java and J2ME.

Last time I evaluated the apps for phones I didn’t have enough time to try developing some more complex systems with it. This time I tested the tool by creating a client application for my Remote TV Recording Service. With this system the user can start recording a TV channel whenever and where ever they are. I have had at least dozen of times when I haven’t been near the TV and I remember that my favourite show or important program is just starting. This application is aimed to these situations. The Remote TV Recording Service operates as an interface between a mobile client application and server’s Digital Video Recorder (DVR) software. I implemented this service by creating a simple Web Service with a single operation called startRecording(int channel, int minutes).

I was quite amazed by apps for phones functionality because when I implemented this service into a mobile application using apps for phone I didn’t have to write a single line of code (see the screenshot). Every action could be configured mostly with mouse clicks via the integrated development interface (IDE). The Web Service wizard was especially handy and easy to use. I bet that writing this kind of midlet using plain Java would take atleast few more days coding. And if development is thought on higher level then there would be more unit and system testing and maintaining involved in this project compared to application developed with RAD tool.

As a final words I may say that apps for phones have made their great tool even better. There most certainly are places where this tool should be used instead of “traditional” coding. One should consider about the savings that this tool will bring by cutting down the development time.

But don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself by downloading the evalutation version of the apps for phone RAD tool.

How to create and use Mobile Class Library with NetBeans 4.0
How to create a J2ME MIDP RSS Reader application with NetBeans 4.0

You can also download the finished RSS Reader MIDlet application here.

After I had played with the NetBeans, I thought that it was the only tool that allowed this kind of rapid development. But few days ago I got an email from Bill Colwill from the company called apps for phones, who was kind enough to introduce me to their new development tool called apps for phones. The minute I tried this new software I was stunned even more. The apps for phones lets you design the UI with custom components that look the same on several J2ME platforms as compared to native J2ME applications that may look a lot different depending on the used device. The software is really easy to use as even sales men can design applications (although I can’t say this is a good thing).

Altogether the software seems to be too good to be true as I was able to create a simple grocery list application in a few hours from start to finish and I could emulate it instantly on multiple devices with genuine look and feel. I think this is the best part of this software as it includes multiple fully integrated device emulators for easy testing. Usually if I ever wanted to test an application on different manufacturers phone I had to download an emulator from the manufacturer (if it was even available) and pray that it would work with the current IDE enviroment.

I encourage all of you J2ME enthusiastics and non-developers to try the demo version of this apps for phones software. The demo version and additional information can be obtained from their website at http://www.appsforphones.com

For a comparison try out the new NetBeans IDE 4.1 beta’s mobile UI designer at http://www.netbeans.org

Still… :) I will keep my hands dirty with the source code, but I can quite well understand the benefits that are made possible by using this kind of RAD tools as they can really cut down the development costs for mobile application development.ikoni