Thursday, September 08, 2005

BB : BlackBerry MDS Studio

This is part of the BlackBerry Mobile Data System v4.1

http://www.blackberry.com/developers/promos/mds.shtml?CPID=OTC-devsept02

From the FAQ:

"BlackBerry MDS Studio is a powerful visual application design and assembly tool that allows developers to quickly create applications using drag and drop functionality."

It's different to a vanilla J2ME application because "BlackBerry MDS Applications are applications developed using BlackBerry MDS Studio and that require BlackBerry MDS Runtime Environment to be installed on the device in order to run."

So much like Windows Mobile where you also have to load the Compact Framework.

One question?

"Q: Does BlackBerry MDS support Microsoft .NET?
Yes. BlackBerry MDS Applications can integrate directly with Web Services created with
Microsoft .NET tools and running within a Microsoft .NET environment."

That's actually saying you can create a Blackberry client that speaks via web services to a .NET server. It doesn't mean that you can run .NET applications on a Blackberry. Isn't that the usual meaning of "support"?

Best of all though "BlackBerry MDS Studio is based on Eclipse. Eclipse is a widely used open source IDE framework that can be extended to create software development tools for particular types of applications."

Got to be heaps better than the current IDE. Finally some standardisation and another feather in the cap for Open Source.

Bring it on!

Enjoy!

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