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

Running the application


Now that you have the project imported, it's time to fire it up and run it in the simulator. The simulator is there to provide a test environment that is pretty close to a real device. Of course, it isn't a real device, but for most applications and most situations it works just fine. The most important feature of the simulator is that you can use it to do debugging line-by-line (if you need to). We'll get into that aspect of it a bit more later on, but for now let's just get the application running.

Working with the simulator is straightforward and is easy to use. Most of the time you will just need to use the keyboard to simulate keystrokes, but if you really want to, you can click on any button on the screen. You can even click and drag the trackball to move it around, but this isn't very efficient most of the time.

Each key on the BlackBerry simulator is mapped to a key on your PC keyboard. Most of those mappings are direct, that is, the a key on your PC maps to...