subject: Blackberry Application Development Adding More Functionality To Your Smartphone [print this page] Since its arrival few years ago, Blackberry has been one of the most sought after and talked about smartphone gadgets among the individuals as well as businesses. The power-packed series of Blackberry smartphones was all set to deliver more than the run-of-the-mill mobile phones that were flooding the market then. And what was it that made the BlackBerry smartphones so very special? It was the collection of applications that could do almost everything that a combination of computer and mobile could do. Software developers saw this as a great opportunity to be a part of the BlackBerrys growing business. The result was a slew of BlackBerry application programming campaigns to develop the best applications for the BlackBerry platform. Now this kind of programming comes with a considerable degree of investment of time and resources.
Software developers who want to try their hand with BlackBerry application programming need to understand one thing. Every application written for the BlackBerry platform is done only through Java, and more specifically Java ME (Micro Edition). Now since BlackBerry application development is possible only through Java ME, which BlackBerry supports, there are a few hitches that a developer should be aware of. For instance, porting code becomes quite a handful as the class libraries of Java ME are really small. This also throws another challenge for the developers who now have to be well versed with the several APIs before they can get down to writing applications for the BlackBerry platform. Moreover, the common false alarms that developers face while testing their applications force them to test them on real devices. Surely, so many hurdles would seem more discouraging rather than encouraging for software developers who want to make it big here.
Developing a BlackBerry application is not as easy as many eager software developers will have learned by now. You need to understand the entire BlackBerry matrix before you can develop something really good for its smartphones. And this, sadly, is a specialization that you can sharpen over a period of time and not right way, no matter how experienced you are in application programming. Perhaps thats the reason why the market for BlackBerry application developers isnt so hot compared to the likes of iPhone.
