Lightweight User Interface Toolkit
| Developer(s) | Sun Microsystems |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.3
/ December 15, 2009 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | Java |
| Type | Widget Toolkit |
| License | GPL linking exception |
| Website | https://lwuit.dev.java.net/ |
LWUIT is a Widget toolkit developed by Sun Microsystems to enable easier Java ME user interface development for existing devices. LWUIT is inspired by Swing and supports many of its features including pluggable look and feel, layout managers etc.
History
LWUIT was created by Chen Fishbein of Sun Microsystems Israel development center (SIDC) who started developing LWUIT for an internal project. The project grew at which point Shai Almog joined the project which was announced at JavaOne 2008, following the announcement the project was made open source by Sun under the GPL with ClassPath Exception license and gained wide acceptance within the community. LWUIT is known as the Lightweight UI Toolkit, where the word lightweight is used as it is used in Swing to indicate a component model that performs all of its own rendering/event handling. [1]
Architecture
LWUIT is inspired heavily by Swing in its architecture although it is much smaller and arguably simpler. LWUIT is very different from Swing and has taken on features unavailable in Swing such as themeing, painters, animations etc. However features such as MVC, layout managers, renders and the EDT are directly related to Swing. [2] LWUIT is based on a Component/Container hierarchy composite architecture. Containers are Components and can be nested to create elaborate layouts. Components can be styled both via external styles/themes and programmatically by developers.
Community
LWUIT is constantly ranked as one of the most active java.net projects and its forums are some of the most active forums in the community. [3]
References
Bibliography
- Sarkar, Biswajit (September 21, 2009). Wicket in Action (1st ed.). Packt Publishing. p. 300. ISBN 184719740X.