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

Chapter 5. Learning the Basics About the UI

In the last chapter, we created a very simple but useful application using the screen framework provided by the BlackBerry SDK. We used only two of the Field classes though and there are many others to explore. In this chapter, we will dig into that framework more and explore each of other Field classes in detail. The framework does a lot for us automatically, and we saw some of that in the last chapter as well. In this chapter, we will talk more about the services that are provided by the framework in detail.

Here are a few things that we will cover as we proceed through this chapter:

  • What is a Field

  • What field styles are and how they can be used to change the appearance and behavior of a Field

  • How to use common Field classes such as EditField and ChoiceField

  • Gain an understanding of what makes each field different and what specific features are implemented in each class