LWUIT blog highlights pain with deviation from stds

Posted by Kieran on November 5, 2009 under J2ME, LWUIT, Mobile, Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

One of the great aspects of frameworks such as LWUIT and freely available information with regards to device groupings, is the promise of finally achieving the nirvana of “write one run anywhere” or the new idiom which seems to be “write once deploy anywhere”

Thankfully we do seem to be leaving the dark days of fragmentation in the Java mobile world behind us, it is fairly easy to get lulled into a false sense of security.

Shai’s closing comment on the article highlights the sort of “discovery” that device specific information, when not in the public domain, may cause many developers to burn time.

To quote Shai:

Applications are expected to explicitly declare their support for touch to utilize the full screen of the device. This is done using the following Jad flags:

Navi-Key-Hidden: true
Nokia-MIDlet-On-Screen-Keypad: no
MIDlet-Touch-Support: true

Notice that the last entry (MIDlet-Touch-Support) is required by current/older Samsung/LG devices but is illegal by the MIDP specification hence fails on Nokia etc. so for support on these devices you would need a copy of your JAD (only the jad) with this attribute added.

Read Shai’s full article, which includes some good tips on using LWUIT on touch devices http://lwuit.blogspot.com/2009/11/optimized-for-touch.html#ixzz0VvlYKZXm