LWUIT Released as GPL Open Source

Posted by R.J. Lorimer on Aug 24, 2008

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Development,

Architecture & Design

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Java ,

Mobile

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Java ME

Sun recently announced the licensing for LWUIT - the Lightweight UI Toolkit for Java ME devices:

[...] today Sun is announcing the release and immediate availability of the complete source code of the LWUIT framework under the GPLv2 license with the Classpath Exception. This license choice provides the benefits of open source innovation and collaborative development while offering a risk-free path to adoption by commercial products - a model everybody should feel very comfortable with.

LWUIT was initially announced back in April, and was presented at JavaOne this year. The original announcement details a number of the key features of LWUIT:

• Swing-like MVC
• Layouts
• Pluggable look-and-feel and themes
• Fonts
• Touch screen support
• Animations and transitions
• Rich widgets
• 3D integration
• Painters
• External tools support
• I18N/L10N support
• Moderate performance and footprint requirements
• Multi-platform support
• SVG (scalable vector graphics) integration (forthcoming)

A liberal open-source license has always been one main plans for LWUIT, so the announcement of the release under GPLv2 is not necessarily a surprise, however it is an important milestone for the adoption of LWTUI by the community.

LWUIT was created largely to fulfill the role of a familiar GUI API format (similar to Swing or Java ME AGUI), that works and looks consistent across ME platforms, is easy to deploy, and is readily accessible to developers (hence the GPL license).

Further updates regarding LWUIT can be found on the LWUIT home page, and on the LWUIT weblog.

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