LinkTogether: Coproduced by You and Network Solutions

In what seems like the blink of an eye – and after years of wireless industry analysts telling us this would happen – it seems the mobile device market has shifted rapidly away from standard mobile phone devices to “smartphone” devices equipped with full touch-screens and/or QWERTY keyboards, 3G wireless communications capabilities, GPS, 2 megapixel+ cameras with video capture capabilities, and much more.  Clearly, the two market leaders at this point seem to be Research In Motion’s BlackBerry platform and the  Apple iPhone, both of which couldn’t be more different from a software development standpoint.  The iPhone requires development to be done on a MacOS computer, using the Apple iPhone SDK and Objective-C programming language, the output of which must be deployed and marketed through the Apple iTunes application store.  While it has obviously been wildly successful, it’s also obviously highly proprietary and targeted, at the end of the day, to commercial applications built for the general public at large.  The BlackBerry development options, meanwhile, are quite different and tend to cater to a more corporate/enterprise type of development crowd.

BlackBerry development options are perhaps a tad more confusing, primarily because they are more diverse and targeted at various types of applications and application developers.  Development options must first be broken down into two groups:  client-side and server-side.  Server-side development options include the ability for direct integration with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server product through the Administration or Transcoder APIs (http://na.BlackBerry.com/eng/deliverables/8891/Transcoder.pdf) or for direct data synchronization between devices and server data stores using the Synchronization Server SDK (http://na.BlackBerry.com/eng/support/docs/subcategories/?userType=21&category=BlackBerry+Java+Application+Development&subCategory=Synchronization+Server+SDK).

In terms of client development, BlackBerry developers have three primary options.  The first is the development of applications specifically designed for the BlackBerry browser itself, which could be as simple as development of a standard XHTML web application that uses basic functionality or as advanced as an AJAX-enabled web app that takes advantage of BlackBerry browser-specific capabilities such as data push and offline form queuing.  For those developers interested in development of richer client applications, there are two primary options:  Java application development and what RIM refers to as “Rapid” application development.  While obviously developing in Java can also be referred to as rapid application development, depending on the application complexity, what RIM means by “Rapid” (with a capital R) are apps developed using the BlackBerry MDS Studio and underlying MDS framework on devices that require the deployment and runtime utilization of a Blackberry Enterprise Server.  These apps will also only run on a Blackberry smartphone whereas Java apps built according to the pure J2ME spec could run on a Blackberry device or any other J2ME-equipped device.  Of course, the BlackBerry Java APIs include functionality that, if utilized, will lock your application into a Blackberry device anyways, but perhaps without the overhead of the Blackberry Enterprise Server requirement on the server-side.

To get started with BlackBerry development today, visit the BlackBerry Developer’s Zone at http://na.BlackBerry.com/eng/developers/.