Blackberry Development Talk

5 Basic Facts about Blackberry Development

Feb 25, 2010 Blackberry Development

With the advancement in mobile technology and increasing share of smart phones more and more companies are investing in Blackberry application development and increasing number of software developers are focusing on this platform. As one of the most popular business phones it is likely that many businesses would like to have their applications ported on Blackberry for increased productivity and this is creating a golden opportunity for developers.

From a software developer’s perspective who wants to cash in on this tide and rather become a “blackberry developer”, here are few basic facts that you need to know:

Java – Blackberry software is written in Java. For all non-browser applications Java is the only choice for Blackberry developers. C or C++ doesn’t work with Blackberry.

It’s  Java ME – Blackberry basically supports Java Micro Edition ( Java ME) which is basically a much stripped down version of Java used specifically for mobile development. The class libraries are much smaller in Java ME compared to Java which makes it difficult to port codes from existing Java applications.

Blackberry APIs – As Java ME has a smaller class library Blackberry augments the feature with its own device specific API’s including the GUI API. To develop a blackberry application one would need to have a real good understanding of these APIs.

Blackberry Device- Yes, you definitely need a Blackberry device to test your application. There are Blackberry simulators that you can use for some testing but the simulators are never full proof and especially so for Blackberry. You must test your application on a Blackberry device and preferably on multiple devices.

Blackberry Infrastructure – To be honest Blackberry infrastructure is probably the most complex compared to the other popular mobile platforms and for Blackberry development it is extremely important to understand the entire Blackberry infrastructure – just learning Java and Blackberry APIs would not cut the mark.

Blackberry development is an extremely specialized job and any software developer who plans to take up blackberry development seriously would need to spend ample time  and effort in understanding the infrastructure, the language, the APIs and it is only with experience that you can master it.

Tags: Blackberry API, infrastructure, java, JavaME