Qualcomm's new Brew UI Framework brings user themes, form management, a rich new pool of UI controls, and a model-view-controller architecture to the Brew platform. This article demonstrates how to make use of these new features with a sample app designed to track the money that changes hands at the local Starbucks.
by Ray Rischpater
September 29, 2004
ast June, Qualcomm took the wraps off one of the most significant changes to Qualcomm Brew in over two years: the Brew UI Toolkit, an entirely new paradigm for Brew user interface development. Applications written with the Brew UI Toolkit have access to user interface elements traditionally available to Brew applications, along with a slew of new controls, along with layout management, application state management through forms, and nested user interface control hierarchies.
Unfortunately, a change this wide-sweeping is not without cost: to take advantage of the Brew UI Toolkit, you must forego using the existing Brew controls based on the IControl interface. Consequently, moving to the Brew UI Toolkit is not a trivial effort, because you need to learn the new interfaces and the programming paradigm embraced by the Brew UI Toolkit team before you begin. This investment, however, more than pays off; your application has access to features difficult or impossible to implement using the previous control-based interfaces, and your application will be better structured as well. This isn't to say that you have to migrate your Brew 3.x application to support widgets; it's only an option. You're still free to use the existing control interface instead of widgets, although choosing to use the existing control interface limits your options, especially if you want to use one of the new widgets that doesn't have a corresponding IControl implementation.
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ast June, Qualcomm took the wraps off one of the most significant changes to Qualcomm Brew in over two years: the Brew UI Toolkit, an entirely new paradigm for Brew user interface development. Applications written with the Brew UI Toolkit have access to user interface elements traditionally available to Brew applications, along with a slew of new controls, along with layout management, application state management through forms, and nested user interface control hierarchies.
