Java MIDP on Palm - override String and Image Item layouts

[Kurt Milligan]

Hi all

I'm developing an app for the Palm using J2ME/MIDP 1.0.

Everything works pretty good, except for the very limited control I
have over the placement of "Item"s, especially StringItem and
ImageItem. They get placed to the right side of the screen (to the
right of the "label") regardless of what I do, and it's not acceptable
to the client.

I guessing things like that are hardcoded in "Layout" and other
classes, and I wanted to know if anyone has tried to override or
create new versions of the various Item classes that allow for greater
layout control...I am thinking about de-compiling these classes to see
what's going on, but before I go that deep...

TIA
-Kurt

 

[Darryl L. Pierce]

I'm developing an app for the Palm using J2ME/MIDP 1.0.

Everything works pretty good, except for the very limited control I
have over the placement of "Item"s, especially StringItem and
ImageItem. They get placed to the right side of the screen (to the
right of the "label") regardless of what I do, and it's not acceptable
to the client.

I guessing things like that are hardcoded in "Layout" and other
classes, and I wanted to know if anyone has tried to override or
create new versions of the various Item classes that allow for greater
layout control...I am thinking about de-compiling these classes to see
what's going on, but before I go that deep...

Two things:

1) You can't extend any of the high-level widgets in the
javax.microedition.lcdui package; they're all declared final.

2) You can't decompile any of them and retrofit them to get around 1)
above as that's against the licensing agreement you accepted when you
downloaded MIDP4Palm.

The best you can do is either try out one of the open-sourced UI
packages for MIDP, such as LWT or OWT, or write your own widgets. But,
the best thing is to allow the MIDP implementation do what it does,
especially if portability is going to be important to you in future.