User Interface Extensions

Although PDAP and MIDP provide user interface APIs appropriate to the corresponding devices, some extensions are available for both profiles.

For PDAP, kAWT provides some additional widgets such as a tabbed pane, a progress bar, and an option dialog to overcome some of the limitations in the widget set of AWT when compared to SWING.

Three different user interface extensions are available for MIDP. The Open Windowing Toolkit (OWT) provides a set of simple lightweight widgets based on the MIDP Canvas class. OWT is developed by DigitalFocus for Nextel and Motorola. Motorola itself provides a similar widget toolkit called the Lightweight Windowing Toolkit (LWT). Unfortunately, LWT is available for Motorola phones only. Finally, the kAWT toolkit provides an AWT subset on top of the MIDP canvas toolkit. Table 10.6 contains a brief overview of the APIs available. As with the XML parsers, there is a tradeoff between size and functionality. Figure 10.5 shows the OWT Grass Seed sample application; Figure 10.6 shows the KawtDemo MIDlet.