What do you think about Kuix ?

To be able to implement in Kuix the best things to be in phase with developers needs, we would like to question you.

- What do you think about Kuix ?

- Do you think it's easy to use or a nightmare ?

- What do you think about the XML/CSS approach at runtime ?

- What do you need to have and Kuix doesn't have ?

- Do you prefer to use an other UI Frameword ?

kind of lonely here... but anyways... I actually found you guys a few months ago.  I'm really interested in the project, I worked on Synclast, which was very similar on the canvas based UI toolkit level, and I wrote the XML->UI layer with databinding and animation support and stuff like that that.  Anyways... the company didn't allow that stuff to get opensourced, and I don't work there anymore.  Which brings me here!  So ya, like minds for sure, and now I'm having to choose between kuix and lwuit for the project I'm about to start.  The CLDC1.1 requirement might kill the lwuit option.  But some of the simple animation stuff would be great in kuix.  I don't need 3d cube transitions (haha) but a sliding screen, or sliding component sort of thing would be a great visual indicator to the user, as far as action goes. 

I do have a question though, looking through the tutorial a few times, I'm curious about css image resolution.  Is there a way to say:  url(blah.png) and have 'blah.png' get loaded from a new datasource? Similar to how you handle the DataProvider solution, but perhaps with Image, or even Object resolution services rather than just String.  That would allow me as a developer to download new XML interface dependencies OTA, and have a much more dynamic application.  Of course some way to cache those would be even better, but that can always be handled in the implemented ImageDataProvider (or whatever) implementation of the application developer.

beyond that, the application I'm working for is for a large company with lots of carrier deals here in the US, and there's no way they'll allow their application to be opensourced.  What kind of private licensing to you guys offer for this case, which obviously doesn't go with the GPL, 'use our source / show your source' mentality?

thanks!

-pandora

I take back the transitions comment, now that I've seen it in the javadocs ;)

Yes transitions have been added in the 1.0.0RC3. At the moment only two kind of transition are implemented (Slide and fade), but you can implments your own transition effects.

Else, about dynamic images and CSS, it's right that it is not possible at the moment. While parsing CSS, images are loaded and kept as javax.microedition.lcdui.Image instance. The only way to load dynamic images from an external file is to use Picture's widget, picture's imageData attribute and DataProvider. In this case the dataprovider give to the picture widget a byte array representing an encoded image (png or jpg, ...). This solution is not so elegent, but it works. In an ideal world it would be great to give an Image instance instead of a byte array ... Actualy I do not find a magic solution to implements this feature in through CSS.

Else, for licensing, check this link : http://www.kalmeo.com/products/kuix

thank's for the license link, I have a feeling I'm going with kuix over lwuit.  As my previous work obviously shows, I'm a big fan of xml/css for j2me.  As part of my XML UI work with Synclast, I did the ImageDataProvider idea, and it worked out great, as you could download a brand new XML from the network, and all the images would get resolved on the fly, with caching to the RMS and all that. 

well... kuix is opensource right? maybe I can contribute some of my experience in this similar field :)

the transitions look great in the RC3 demo, I haven't seen the slide transition, but fade looks great, those weren't in kuix last time I looked, nice work!  What about sub-screen level transitions?  like animating a menu on/off screen, etc.  Is that possible yet?

When you say ImageDataProvider, you want to talk about a manager that can be able to deliver image data from local as from remote sources with a cache system ? And what about loading progression for distant images ?

> well... kuix is opensource right? maybe I can contribute some of my experience in this similar field :)

Yes, we are opened for all kind of contributions, but you need to know that for the moment we want to keep the copyright on Kuix.

> What about sub-screen level transitions?  like animating a menu on/off screen, etc.  Is that possible yet?

This is not possible yet, we'd prefer to make a strong base structure (Widget, layout, DataProvider, ...) before implementing animations, it's in our plan, but after the 1.0 release.

hey, i'm trying to put together a little helloworld example with kuix, I'm actually just starting with your guys' helloworld tutorial.  I'm using these jars:

kuix-1.0.0RC3.jar 

kutil-1.0.0.jar

and with the helloworld midlet, if I try to build the project in Sun WTK, I get:
Error preverifying class org.kalmeo.kuix.core.Kuix$3
Build failed
    java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: org/kalmeo/util/Filter

I checked the Kuix.java source and it looks fine, it imports org.kalmeo.util.Filter, but for some reason preverify is choking on the 'new Filter()' inner classes of Kuix.java

any ideas why?  I'm just tryin to get this up and running so I try it out for the application I'm going to be starting soon at work.

thanks!

Yes, I don't know why, WTK has a strange way to use lib jars. If you put kuix-xx.jar and kutil-xx.jar in the lib folder it doesn't work. But if you rebuild a new jar by concat kuix and kutil jar, it works ...

It is very good. But size of framework is rather big, about >100Kb after built.