Opening A New Tab In LWUIT

Late last week Chen finally committed one of our long outstanding promises to the LWUIT community, a rewrite of the aging TabbedPane. When we initially released LWUIT 1.0, the tabbed pane was one of the more complex components since it depended on several different LWUIT components to provide its functionality and was limited by missing features in LWUIT.
When the tabbed pane was written there was only one style per component, there was no Border object, no z-ordering. Eventually we chose an architecture for the TabbedPane that revolved around a list component coupled with a container and rather elaborate border drawing. The biggest drawback was the tedious customization process requiring manually deriving the look and feel to customize the renderer logic of the tabs.

The final push we needed to "just do it" was from Thorsten who took my swipe demo code and just turned it into a more real world demo using actual components... Very cool stuff. This inspired Chen to truly revolutionize the component and create a completely new touch optimized tabbed pane implementation that still works with the regular keyboard although differently (you now have to press fire to actually switch a tab).

Since the changes are so huge we decided to create a whole new drop in component called Tabs which is a drop in replacement for TabbedPane (just change all references to Tabs). For the next version of LWUIT we will probably remove TabbedPane entirely and have now deprecated its usage.

In the video you can see a very simple demo, the component supports allot of functionality that isn't demoed such as hidden tabs (for just a gesture based UI), full customization of the tabs etc. To make this demo I just changed the tabbed pane references in the LWUIT demo to Tabs.