[Zigurd]

There is a built-in UI framework in J2ME/MIDP: LCDUI. It's possible to make a very compact UI implementation using LCDUI. The problem is that, on some platforms, it WILL look like crap. On some, with decent fonts and a good LCDUI implementation it will look pretty good for menu/button/list UIs. But designers used to designing Web pages find it rudimentary and a design straitjacket.

I also found that among the handful of J2ME/LCDUI implementations required to cover a broad range of handset models, they all had different bugs, and I had to make a compatibility layer to smooth over these differences and bugs. BUT, nevertheless, it is possible to make a UI in single digit KBs that is portable across multiple J2ME implementations.

[ak1394]

There was/is a great UI library for J2ME called LWUIT. It arrived pretty late, but it was very good at abstracting the differences of various J2ME platforms (i.e. differences key codes/keyboard layouts, screen sizes and such). https://lwuit.java.net/

Back then, I wrote a Twitter client app for them J2ME phones with some processing offloaded to the server, which was done in Erlang :) Ah, the times.

[invalidname]

Its still around and became Codename One http://www.codenameone.com/ and its way better as such.

[johansch]

I found LCDUI practically unusable (in order to build a compelling app). Pretty much like anything else coming out of Sun after 2002.

[stuaxo]

It is awful, you want to use an alternative.