Blackberry development, is it as friendly as a smartphone?
I was playing around with smart phone development (windows ce) and it looked pretty straight forward using vs .net and having a good emulator, etc.
How does blackberry develop? Seeing how he uses JavaME, I guess learning SDK / syntax for a .net developer is not that hard.
But what about IDE development, debugging, emulators, etc.?
source to share
I have very limited experience with Blackberry, but from what I have it is quite user-friendly. Java is quite similar to C #, which you would probably use for CE development.
You will probably be using Eclipse for the IDE, which is good after you get used to it. This will probably disappoint you a little in Visual Studio, but give it a try.
As far as debugging and emulators are concerned, from my limited experience, there is no problem there. In fact, I find Blackberry a much nicer platform than any CE device in many ways.
There is also a Visual Studio plugin for Blackberry development, but this requires a runtime installed in the Blackberries that uses the developed programs, so it is really only useful for enterprise applications where you control users phones.
source to share
BlackBerry provides a Java development environment that has a number of integrated tools (notably coverage, memory usage, and profiling) in addition to syntax highlighting and flash-insertion editor, compiler, and debugger. Also included are BlackBerry code signing tools, JAD and COD generation.
I found it much easier for me to develop code in Eclipse, compile with Ant (using RAPC Ant etaras tasks), but they seem to be gone - BlackBerry Ant Tools seems to be a good fit for replacement) and use JDE for debugging / profiling and etc.
I have not used the new RIM Eclipse plugin.
MDS Studio has frameworks based on Eclipse and Visual Studio. I found it handy for prototyping user interfaces, but rather cumbersome to do any custom development. BB calls it "rapid application development" and it has paradigm strengths and weaknesses.
I've found that BlackBerry development is very similar to other custom Java-based applications - if you're developing standard J2ME Midlet applications, you don't need to know much more. If you really want to take advantage of the unique features of BlackBerry, integrate with BB apps, etc., you need to learn the BlackBerry-specific APIs - the javadoc is pretty good, forums and help documents help, but there are a few real "overview" docs or docs to tell you how to put it all together.
Caveat Emptor, YMMV, etc., ad nauseum.
source to share
I actually just bought a blackberry for this very reason. You can use the Eclipse IDE and then install the JDE plugin. The JDE plugin includes the BlackBerry sdk as well as some emulators.
EDIT - http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/javaappdev/
I ran into the problem a few weeks ago when I was setting up the environment, however I found my solution on the Blackberry forums. YMMV
There's also another Blackberry IDE called "Blackberry MDS studio" This is an alternative to Java. I know that some of my colleagues who are Lotus Notes developers favor this IDE are more visual. Personally, I prefer Java being a Java developer.
source to share