Blackberry provides an SDK for developers who want to develop applications for a Blackberry device. And, like all other mobile SDKs I have come across the documentation doesn’t answer all your questions. So, here is a short tutorial to satisfy the hunger for programming Blackberry devices.
You will need Blackberry’s JDE. You can download it from here :
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/javaappdev/javadevenv.jsp
Don’t download the eclipse plugin. It is for programming MIDlets which deal with J2ME. You will also need to download and install JDK from sun.com. Just getting the JRE is not enough, you need the whole JDK. You can get JDK from here :
http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/?intcmp=1281
Java 6 update 10 is the latest version of JDK and 4.6 is the latest version of Blackberry JDE at the time of this writing.
Install JDK first. After installing the JDK click on Control Panel -> System . Click on Advanced tab and then click on “Environment variables”. A dialog will popup. Select the PATH variable and click Edit. Assuming you installed JDK in the default path, add the line below in the text box that says “Variable value” :
;c:\program files\java\C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_10\bin
If you installed the JDK somewhere else or installed a different version, then change the path accordingly. Make sure there is a semi-colon (;)at the beginning of the path you insert.
Now that the JDK installed, install Blackberry JDE (double click on the installation file). It will find the default JDK’s path from the location you entered in the environment variable “PATH”. After JDE is done installing, you should be able to run it without any problems. Click Start -> Research in motion -> JDE to run it.
Leave a Reply