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Mobile Technology Blog

Mobile Observations

© 2010 Paxmodept

Pax Java ME (J2ME) Framework

In Java ME the native MIDP GUI elements are ugly and inflexible. In order to create decent looking user interfaces for MIDP applications, developers must either write their own custom low level GUI components or use those from an existing library. The process of writing these components from scratch is a time consuming and expensive process and needs to take device fragmentation and variable screen sizes into account from the very beginning. Being Java developers ourselves we found the existing GUI libraries insufficient for our interface requirements and have therefore created our own GUI library from the ground up.

Our GUI library is intended for use on most Java ME capable devices and we have worked hard to ensure that various device idiosyncrasies like screen size, keyboard mappings and input modes have all been taken into account. The library has been designed to function much like existing Swing components so Java developers will feel very comfortable using the API programmatically. Our GUI does not rely on preprocessing and can be easily used in both the Netbeans and Eclipse IDE's so that developers can work with our code within their preferred development environment.

At the heart of our library is an extremely flexible layout manager which has support for a variety of different layout styles (Flow, Border and Grid) but also, more importantly, allows developers to combine different layout styles on the same screen. In conjunction with this powerful layout manager we have a wide selection of GUI components which can act as either widgets or containers and be added to each other at will based on a standard component tree architecture. Both the layout styles and GUI components can be easily skinned to look and feel exactly how you want.

The most important feature of our library is it's speed and performance. The library has been designed and optimised to work across a huge range of devices and we have spent a great deal of time ensuring that the performance of every GUI component is lightning fast even on the most basic MIDP 2.0 devices. Please feel free to compare the performance of our demo application to similar products. We hope you will be pleasantly surprised. Please email us if you have any questions.

Component Screenshots (click on image for more)

Applications Using the GUI Library