Book Image

BlackBerry Java Application Development

Book Image

BlackBerry Java Application Development

Overview of this book

BlackBerry Smartphone was once the domain of jet-setting business users with power suits. Now you can hardly go anywhere without seeing someone using a BlackBerry to check their messages or make a call. It's this kind of explosive growth that makes the BlackBerry ecosystem a great place to develop and market applications through the BlackBerry App World store—this book shows you how to do just that! This step-by-step guide gives you a hands-on experience of developing innovative Java applications for your BlackBerry. With the help of this book, you will learn to build your own applications to illustrate the platform, and the various capabilities that developers can use in their programs. It explores the powers of Blackberry and helps you develop professional and impressive Java applications. The book teaches how to write rich, interactive, and smart BlackBerry applications in Java. It expects the readers to know Java but not Java Mobile or the BlackBerry APIs. We will learn to build rich, interactive, and smart Java applications for the BlackBerry. The book will cover UI programming, data storage, programming network, and internet API apps. As we move on, we will learn more about the BlackBerry's device features, such as messaging, GPS, multimedia, contacts and calendar, and so on.This book also helps you build your own applications to illustrate the platform, and the various capabilities that developers can use in their programs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
BlackBerry Java Application Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface

BitmapField


A BitmapField is another display-only field that shows, you guessed it, a bitmap image. You can use your own image or one of the stock images in the system. Also, just because the name is BitmapField doesn't mean that you have to use BMP files. In fact, the JDE doesn't support BMP files at all. The JDE supports only JPG, GIF, or PNG files. PNG files are actually preferred though, simply because they are typically much smaller in size than the other formats. We'll show how to use both using the Bitmap class.

The first step to using a BitmapField is to create the Bitmap object. The operating system comes with several stock images that are used in operating system functions already. They are identified not by filenames, but by special constant values in the Bitmap class such as INFORMATION, WARNING, and ERROR. Bitmap objects can be created to use these predefined images using the static method getPredefinedBitmap. Most of the time you use these constants when creating dialogs...