How to Develop Blackberry Smartphone Applications

In the world of Smartphones and PDAs, it has become necessary to have easy access to up to date information, stock prices, news, games, traffic and weather conditions. All this information is available on fingertips due to popularity of smartphones like Blackberry, iPhone and Droid. Developing applications for these phones is a very lucrative business today.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Blackberry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse
• Blackberry Simulator
• Blackberry phone and data cable (optional)
• Basic knowledge of JAVA programming.

1. GET STARTED -
   
   In order to get an overview of Blackberry devices and the software architecture, it is important to read Blackberry application development tutorials from the developers website. Link is given in resources section.
   It will also be helpful to browse the various JAVA classes and objects that can be used in blackberry application development. These are referenced in the API reference library. Link is provided in resources section.

2. DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL TOOLS -
   
   The system requirements for blackberry application development are:
   Windows 2000 SPI or later, or Windows XP
   Windows Vista (Blackberry JDE v4.2.1 and higher)
   Java SE JDK v6.0 (Can be downloaded from Sun Microsystems website)
   Download and Install the Blackberry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse from Blackberry application development website.
   Download and Install Blackberry smartphone simulator from developers website. One of the best simulators is the 9530 touch screen simulator.

3. PROGRAMMING -
   
   Eclipse is one of the best Integrated Development environment for JAVA programming language. Create a new Blackberry project and add new classes and JAVA code files to the project. Building the project will generate a file with .COD extension. This file is an executable file which can be loaded directly in the Blackberry Simulator.

4. SIMULATOR TESTING -
   
   Once code is compiled and a .cod file is successfully created, test the working of the program in Blackberry Simulator. Open the Smartphone simulator and Load the .cod file. Browse to the "Download" folder in simulator and open the new loaded application. Test the application for desires functionality. If everything works as desired then it can be tested on a blackberry device.

5. DEVICE TESTING (OPTIONAL) -
   
   Connect the Blackberry device to computer using manufacturer provided data cable. Open the Blackberry Device Manager software. Load the created application through Device manager to the Blackberry device. If this method does not work, then use the "Javaloader" command line option to load the .cod file in Blackberry device.

6. PUBLISH APPLICATION -
   
   After completion of successful testing on Simulator and Blackberry Phone and after fixing any bugs, the application can be published on Blackberry's App World.

Tips & Warnings

• Eclipse is a good JAVA development environment to write code and compile. However, Blackberry JDE tool can also be used for writing JAVA code and compiling.
• Write down all ideas for applications somewhere. Idea generation is an important phase of developing Blackberry Applications
• Do not publish code which contains Bugs. Blackberry App World will not accept such code.
• Make sure the developed code works for certain devices. All Blackberry APIs may not work for all Blackberry phones.

Resources

• Blackberry Developers resources
• Blackberry API reference