Speaker : Biswajit Sarkar

Java ME allows us to write applications that are, generally speaking, portable across a wide range of small devices that support the platform. While the basic functionalities usually work well on all supported devices, the area that does pose problems for developers is the User Interface. Native implementations of javax.microedition.lcdui — the primary API for UIs in Java ME — differ so widely from one device to another that maintaining a device independent and uniform look-and-feel is virtually impossible. Another problem with the javax.microedition.lcdui package is that it does not support components and capabilities that can fully satisfy present day user expectations. The Lightweight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) is the solution to these problems. LWUIT offers a wide range of components with a device independent look-and-feel for building UIs. While some of these widgets are also available under lcdui, there are a number of new ones too and these additions enable application developers to design UIs that can come very close to their desktop counterparts in terms of visual sophistication. And LWUIT is not just about new components either. The API supports a whole range of new functionalities (like Theming and Transitions) too.

This session takes the audience through the structure of Java ME including the major optional APIs. The session also explores LWUIT describing the main components and functionalities.

This session is for developers who want to create applications that work on a wide range of mobile devices using Java ME and LWUIT. The session has been designed with the assumption that the audience is familiar with Java but not necessarily with Java ME. Some degree of familiarity with Swing would be useful.

Speaker : Navin Kabra

Google’s Android is a brand new platform for mobile phones, and has been created from scratch specifically for this purpose. This means that it is a ‘modern’ system that does not suffer from any legacy issues, and has taken the best ideas from various other projects to build a system that is arguably better than any of the other, competing, systems. Thus, for example, it uses the Java language as the development language, but has rejected the rest of the Java ecosystem. Specifically it uses a completely new virtual machine (Dalvik) which is redesigned with mobiles in mind – and has a number of very interesting design decisions that we will discuss. Similarly, the Android application framework represents a departure from the traditional way of doing things, and has a learning curve, but once you get used to it, it is great, especially for allowing different apps to share data, code, and in general co-operate. We will explore and discuss this and various other design decisions in Android. This talk can serve as your introduction to “”What is Android”", and more importantly, “”Why is Android”