Wireless Java

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 5: MIDP GUI Programming

User interface requirements for handheld devices are different from those for desktop computers. For example, the display size of handheld devices is smaller, and input devices do not always include pointing tools such as a mouse or pen input. For these reasons, you cannot follow the same user-interface programming guidelines for applications running on handheld devices that you can on desktop computers.

The CLDC itself does not define any GUI functionality. Instead, the official GUI classes for the J2ME are included in profiles such as the MIDP and are defined by the Java Community Process (JCP). You'll note that the GUI classes included in the MIDP are not based on the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT). That seems like a major issue, which brings us to the following question. Why Not Reuse the AWT?

The MIDP Expert Group decided not to subset the existing AWT and Project Swing classes for the following reasons:

• AWT is designed for desktop computers and optimized for these machines.
• AWT assumes certain user interaction models. The component set of the AWT is designed to work with a pointing device such as a mouse; however, many handheld devices, such as cell phones, have only a keypad for user input.
• AWT has a rich feature set, and includes support for functionality that is not found or is impractical to implement on handheld devices. For example, the AWT has extensive support for window management, such as resizing overlapping windows. However, the limited display size of handheld devices makes resizing a window impractical. Therefore, the window and layout managers within the AWT are not required for handheld devices.
• When a user interacts with an AWT-based application, event objects are created dynamically. These objects exist only until each associated event is processed by the application or system, at which time the object becomes eligible for garbage collection. The limited CPU and memory of handheld devices, however, cannot handle the burden.

The MIDP GUI APIs

Because of the issues outlined earlier, the MIDP contains its own abbreviated GUI, which is much different from AWT. The MIDP GUI consists of both high-level and low-level APIs, each with their own set of events. This chapter discusses and shows examples of using objects from both the high-level and low-level APIs. Handling events from APIs, however, is deferred to the next chapter.

The high-level API is designed for applications where portability between mobile information devices is important. To achieve portability, the API employs a high-level abstraction and gives you little control over its look and feel. For example, you cannot define the visual appearance (shape, color, or font) of the high-level components. Most interactions with the components are encapsulated by the implementation; the application will not be aware of them. Consequently, the underlying implementation does the necessary adaptation to the device's hardware and native user interface style. Classes that implement the high-level API all inherit the javax.microedition.lcdui.Screen class.

The low-level API provides little abstraction. It is designed for applications that need precise placement and control of graphic elements, as well as access to low-level input events. This API gives the application full control over what is being drawn on the display. The javax.microedition.lcdui.Canvas and javax.microedition.lcdui.Graphics classes implement the low-level API. However, we should point out that MIDlets that access the low-level API are not guaranteed to be portable, because this API provides mechanisms to access details that are specific to a particular device.

The MIDP GUI Model

Here's how the MIDP model works, in a nutshell. In order to show something on a MIDP device, you'll need to obtain the device's display, which is represented by the javax.microedition.lcdui.Display class. The Display class is the one and only display manager that is instantiated for each active MIDlet and provides methods to retrieve information about the device's display capabilities.

Obtaining the device's display is easy. However, this object by itself isn't very interesting. Instead, the more interesting abstraction is the screen, which encapsulates and organizes graphics objects and coordinates user input through the device. Screens are represented by the javax.microedition.lcdui.Screen object and are shown by the Display object by calling its setCurrent( ) method. There can be several screens in an application, but only one screen at a time can be visible (or current) in a display, and the user can traverse only through the items on that screen. Figure 5-1 shows the one-to-many relationship between the display and its screens.

There are three types of screens in the MIDP GUI:

• Screens that entirely encapsulate a complex user interface component, such as a List or TextBox component (the List component is shown in Figure 5-8 and the TextBox component is shown in Figure 5-15). The structure of these screens is predefined, and the application cannot add other components to these screens.
• Generic screens that use a Form component. The application can add text, images, and a simple set of related UI components to the form, which acts as a container.
• Screens used within the context of the low-level API, such as a subclass of the Canvas or Graphics class.

The lcdui Package

All MIDP GUI classes are contained in the javax.microedition.lcdui package. This package contains three interfaces and twenty-one classes, as shown in Table 5-1 and Table 5-2.

The class diagram in Figure 5-2 shows the major classes and the relationships between them.

The High-Level MIDP APIs

Now, let's see how the various classes in the high-level API can be used to create GUI components. We will cover two parts of this process: working with screens and the components that subclass them, and working with forms and the components that can be arranged in them.

Working with Screens

Having seen an example of a screen, a few questions immediately come to mind: how do you manage screens, how do you navigate through them, and how do you manage the display and the input devices? The answer is that all this functionality is implemented by the Display class, which includes methods for requesting that objects be displayed on the device, and for retrieving properties of the device.

Display

A reference to the device's display can be obtained by providing a MIDlet reference to the static getDisplay( ) method.

public static Display getDisplay(MIDlet c);

This is typically done in the startApp( ) method of a MIDlet, as follows:

public class MyMIDlet extends MIDlet {
 
   Display display = null;
 
   public MyMIDlet(  ) { // constructor
   }
 
   public void startApp(  ) {
      display = Display.getDisplay(this);
   }
 
   // other methods
}

TIP:   The getDisplay( ) method should be called after the beginning of the MIDlet's startApp( ) method, as shown earlier. It should never be called from the MIDlet's constructor, as per the MIDP specification, as it may not be properly initialized by the application manager at that time.

After you obtain a reference to the device's display, you simply need to create a GUI component to show. Note that all of the GUI components in Figure 5-2 implement the Displayable abstract class. You can pass the GUI component you create to one of Display's two setCurrent( ) methods:

public void setCurrent(Displayable d);
public void setCurrent(Alert alert, Displayable d);

The second method is used when you want to show a temporary alert message followed by the displayable GUI element. We'll discuss alerts later on in this chapter.

To find out what is currently being displayed on the device, use the getCurrent( ) method, which returns a reference to the Displayable object that is currently being displayed....

Read More