Animated Gifs Everywhere

Its not that LWUIT doesn't support animated GIF's as much as the underlying implementation doesn't support them. MIDP doesn't provide any API's to extract the frames of the animated GIF's and get any indication of when to repaint them.
The solution would seem to parse animated GIF's ourselves and paint them ourselves, this isn't trivial since the animated GIF compression and painting logic is rather complex. However, Ugo Chirico seems to have done just that quite a while back!
His image class allows loading and displaying an animated GIF within LWUIT and works for many animated GIF's. It probably won't become a part of LWUIT in part due to copyright issues, but I have made some changes to the way he chose to integrate into LWUIT so you don't actually need to change LWUIT in order to integrate with his code.
Furthermore, when using my modified LWUIT implementation animated GIF's will be automatically detected and "just work" even within the HTML component and other elaborate use cases in LWUIT.
I achieved this by overriding the LWUIT implementation (the VKB version) and all that's necessary to integrate it is to invoke AnimatedGifFactory.install(); before the Display.init() call.

You can get my code from the vprise directory in the LWUIT incubator project, the project includes a small test application within as well.

This can serve as a template to anyone wishing to add additional image support to LWUIT, there are several tricks I used to achieve this:

• Image loading requires detecting the image type from the stream, however once I started reading the stream I will need to handle all image types.... To solve this I added BufferedInputStream which guarantees that mark()/reset() would work on the stream and thus I'm able to restore the input stream to its original state in case the image is not a GIF!
• I return an internal "native" image, but I don't use MIDP at any point. While I haven't tested it I bet my code works well on Android/RIM since I only use LWUIT logic internally.
  One would obviously need to modify the classes from which I derive to the appropriate Android/RIM implementations for this to work...
  
• LWUIT animation calls update the state of the GIF, Ugo did this perfectly and I just used the implementation to map directly to his code.