Sun Open-Sources Java UI Toolkit 59
ruphus13 writes "As the mobile space heats up, Sun has released the source code for Java Lightweight UI Toolkit under the GPL v2 license. ZDNet quotes Sun's senior director of embedded software saying, 'By creating LWUIT, Sun is reaffirming its commitment to the mobile development community and by open-sourcing the LWUIT code, we are enabling mobile developers to quickly and easily create rich, portable interfaces for their applications -- functionality that they have been requesting for some time.' Will Adobe follow suit?"
Sun is also working on some fixes to holes in their mobile Java platform, which were discovered by a Polish researcher who demanded €20,000 to disclose the information.
LWUIT vs JavaFX vs Plasma (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh my, evertying about LWUIT seems ugly. It is an ugly acronym, the screenshots look horrible (green text on a very pink folded person) and the rotating cube is unaliassed and completely unnecessary.
There is an article on ZDnet [zdnet.com] explaining the differences between JavaFX and LWUIT. It explains that LWUIT is a stop gap for people that cannot use JavaFX yet. But looking at the content of the LWUIT homepage I conclude that SUN could have better not release LWUIT at all.
As for phone GUIs, I'm rooting for Plasma [kde.org]. At Akademy last week I saw lots of EEE PCs and other small PCs, Nokia internet tablets, OLPC and OpenMoko machines all running Plasma. And it looks amazing and is easy to use and customize.
Licence is GPL+Classpath Exception. (Score:4, Interesting)
Huge difference.
No 64bit Java plugin (Score:1, Interesting)
They'd better fix this bug:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4802695