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RIM brings single codebase for BlackBerry devs

By Alex Handy

October 29, 2008 — At its developers conference last week, Research In Motion eased the pain of the BlackBerry development community. Updates to tools and packages gave developers what they had been asking for, allowing a single codebase to be modified at compile time for specific mobile devices.

The company also made available updated integrated development packages for Eclipse and VisualStudio, both of which eliminate the need to straddle IDEs during development.

Mike Kirkup, manager of developer relations at RIM, said that many BlackBerry developers had been forced to use Eclipse for Java, and RIM's proprietary IDE for debugging and profiling tasks.

“Now, we've put it all in one place,” said Kirkup. “We have our BlackBerry plug-in for Eclipse, then we have these component package plug-ins that correspond to each version of the handheld software.”

Visual Studio users also got an updated plug-in, which allows Web applications and other non-Java mobile projects to be worked on in that IDE.

In addition to these heavyweight working environments, RIM made available BlackBerry MDS 2.0, a visual development environment that can construct applications based on WSDL files and connect to Microsoft or Oracle databases. MDS is aimed at enterprise developers who need to rapidly design endpoint mobile applications in a Web services environment.

All of these updated development tools benefit from a more streamlined development model, thanks to RIM's addition of preprocessing to the mix.

“In the past, if you wanted to leverage a capability in a newer device, there was a segment of the market that wouldn't be able to use it, so you would write your application to the lowest common denominator,” said Kirkup. “The downside is that you can't take advantage of all the capabilities and innovations in new platforms. With preprocessor support, you can have one single codebase.”

Thus, instead of forking a new version for each individual BlackBerry handset revision, developers can now determine at runtime what features should be compiled into the application.

RIM's development tools can be found at www.blackberry.com/developers.

Related Search Term(s): BlackBerry, Eclipse, Java, mobile development, Visual Studio, RIM

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