Beginning BlackBerry Development (eBook)

Anthony Rizk has been developing for BlackBerry since the very first models appeared in 2001. He is a cofounder of several mobile software companies, including Rove and Zeebu, and has consulted extensively in the BlackBerry application industry.

Contents at a Glance 6
Contents 7
About the Author 12
Setting the Stage 15
What You Need to Know Before You Can Begin 16
Setting Up Your Development Environment 16
What’s Different About Developing for BlackBerry 26
What’s in This Book 27
Hello World 30
Creating an Application with the BlackBerry JDE 30
Creating an Application with the BlackBerry JDE Plug- in for Eclipse 45
Polishing the Application 55
Summary 59
What Makes a BlackBerry Application? 60
Javadocs 60
The BlackBerry Application Life Cycle 62
Threading and the Event Thread 63
Running Background Applications 67
Understanding the Types of Projects 69
Summary 74
User Interface Basics 75
The UI Fun Application 75
The Components of a BlackBerry UI 76
Handling User Interaction 86
Creating Menus 90
Summary 94
Beyond the Basics of User Interfaces 95
Enhancing the UI Fun Application 95
Working with Fonts 97
Drawing to the Screen Using the Graphics Context 99
Creating Custom Fields 102
Creating Custom Managers 117
Creating a Custom Screen 129
Adding the Final Touches 134
Working with the BlackBerry Storm 137
Creating Basic Animation 139
Summary 141
Storing Data 143
Storing Data on the BlackBerry 143
Choices for Persistence 144
BlackBerry Persistent Store 145
The FileConnection API 155
Summary 169
Hello Out There! Making a Network- Enabled Application 170
Different Ways to Connect 170
Service Book 174
The MIDP Connection Framework 176
The Networking Application 179
Connection Method: Using Direct TCP/IP Instead of BES/ MDS 195
Determining Network Availabilty 197
TCP Socket Connections 199
Summary 202
Where Am I? Using Location-Based Services 204
GPS Support on BlackBerry Devices 204
The Location API 205
The Location Application 208
Using BlackBerry Maps 216
Summary 223
Getting Your App Out There: Packaging and Publishing 224
Setting Application Properties 225
Over-the-Air Installation 226
Desktop Installation 229
BlackBerry App World 232
Other Application Stores 243
MobiHand 243
Summary 246
Next Steps 247
Keeping Up-to-Date 247
Farewell 248
Index 249
Special Characters 249
A 249
B 249
C 251
D 252
E 252
F 252
G 253
H 253
I 254
J 254
K 254
L 254
M 255
N 256
O 256
P 256
Q 257
R 257
S 258
T 259
U 259
V 260
W 260
X 260
Z 260