If you think that the most difficult part in writing a Java ME application is make a good looking GUI, you come to the right place. In an old post, I have mention that there are some frameworks/libraries that can help you creating a great GUI in Canvas (MIDP). So, I was googling when I found some interesting lists of projects that could facilitates that. I have not tested all of those projects yet, but, please, feel free to try and report your impressions in this post ;) Most of them are open source, but some have both an open source and a commercial license or just a commercial... Some of them also provide more things, not only GUI stuff...

From http://j2me.ngphone.com/opensource/ui.htm (take a look in this website, there are other lists of nice open source projects):

• Apime
• byblos
• Fire (Flexible Interface Rendering Engine)
• J2ME Lightweght Visual Component Library (LwVCL)
• J4ME: Java For Me
• jMobileCore
• kUI
• MWT (Micro Window Toolkit)
• Nextel's Open Source J2ME Toolkits
• Thinlet
• Synclast UI API

Others (commercial):

• TWUIK
• J2ME Polish
• TinyLine 2D
• Paxmodept

Just setted up a wiki page about it to be used for future references.

Finally, do not forget the Netbeans Mobility Pack specific MIDP components - login screen, splash screen, wait screen, file browser, pim browser, sms composer, table item,... - that are freely available for you. Also, be sure that the target mobile device(s) of you app does not implement JSR 226 (Scalable 2D Vector Graphics API for J2METM), otherwise you could make a beautiful stuff with SVG. Keep an eye in the future with JavaFX Script, could you imagine it running in your device?!

Cheers,
Bruno Ghisi