by Sanjaya Ratnayake

Information has become a critical factor for the today’s business world. Therefore, people try to utilize technology to improve their competitive advantage. As a result Blackberry smart phones came in to the market with various inbuilt features. For example, Email, Corporate data, Instant messaging, phone, internet, organizer, camera and video recorder, social networking and etc.

More importantly we can build custom applications on top of Blackberry. There are three blackberry development platforms. Those are

• Blackberry browser development,
• Rapid application development
• Java application development

Among all those three methods Java application development is the most famous one.        

Blackberry browser development simply takes the advantage of web based UI and wireless connectivity. Blackberry browser is a JavaME application which is part of the operating system. It supports markup languages such as HTML, X-HTML-MP, WML 1.3, Images such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, WBMP, presentation formats such as Frames, RSS, ATOM, and scripting languages such as JavaScript 1.5 including Ajax support, ECMA script, WML Script 1.2.1

Rapid Application Development depends on a back end web server. This method is also call as Blackberry Mobile Data System. Developers can use either Blackberry MDS Studio tool or Blackberry Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio.

Java API on Blackberry enables user to customize user interfaces, data storage, event listening, secure wireless transport, network coverage etc.  

In the next article we will see how to configure Blackberry Java Development Environment