Terrence Barr's Blog

"Radical" SVG Makeover - Not your plain old Java ME app anymore

A couple of years ago at JavaOne the Java Desktop team started the "Extreme GUI Makeover" series where Chris Campbell, Shannon Hickey, and Roman Guy took a plain old Swing application and pulled out all the stops to rework it into a slick and appealing UI.

A couple of months back while thinking about new content for the Sun Tech Days I realized that while SVG and JSR 226 is really cool and becoming available widely on mobile devices as part of the Mobile Services Architecture (JSR 248) today what is really missing for developers is a step-by-step example on how to transform a plain old lcdui.*-based MIDP application into a flashy and engaging SVG/JSR-226-based app. So the idea of the "Radical SVG GUI Makeover" for Java ME was born.

We took an existing MIDP application called the "Yahoo! Local Business Search Client" (quite interesting in itself for the mobile mashup aspect of it and already available under the BSD license in the Mobile Ajax project) and reworked it using SVG technology, graphics tools, and NetBeans JSR-226 support. Thanks to Angela Caicedo and some of our SVG and graphics engineers at Sun in helping me put this together!

Today, we are officially launching this SVG GUI Makeover project under the phoneME UI Labs. Check out the project page including before-and-after screen shots or go straight to the source (as usual, released under BSD so you can copy-and-paste into your own app). By the way, the sources are a ready-to-load NetBeans project so just check them out, open the project, and hit the "Run" button to play with it.

Or, even better, watch my screencast to see the "Radical SVG Makeover" live and to learn about the ME Application Developers project that hosts the phoneME UI Labs as well as the Mobile Ajax project and much more good stuff.

I trust your Java ME applications will never quite be the same again ;-)

Note: I will be doing a talk on this very topic at the Sun Tech Days in Frankfurt in two weeks. Hope you can stop by.

Cheers,

-- Terrence

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Comments

• A small video would be nice. ;)

  Posted by: onyx on November 20, 2007 at 09:00 AM

• Yep, coming!

  Posted by: terrencebarr on November 20, 2007 at 01:10 PM

• Nice screencast. And yes, it's indeed very slick.

  Awesome work. :)

  Posted by: onyx on November 21, 2007 at 12:41 PM

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