Chapter 10

Next Steps

You’ve come quite a way since starting out on your journey. You may have started with little or no knowledge of how to develop BlackBerry applications, but by this point you should be familiar with the basics of developing user interfaces and creating applications that use—among other things—persistent storage, wireless networking, and location-based services.

At this point, you’re more than ready to start building the application of your dreams, but of course there’s always more to know. The BlackBerry platform has been around for a while and has changed quite a bit in that time. It continues to evolve today—like the rest of the mobile world—at a faster pace than ever. BlackBerry App World is the first of many great additions to the platform.

Mobile application development is still in its infancy, and BlackBerry is going to be around and growing with the mobile industry for a long time. So, part of your job as a BlackBerry developer is to stay on top of everything that happens by learning and evaluating new platform capabilities and seeing if the new features can make your applications even better.

Keeping Current

The main source for up-to-date information about BlackBerry is the first one mentioned in this book, the BlackBerry Developer Zone at www.blackberry.com/developers. Along with being the source for all your BlackBerry application development tools, the Resources section contains a lot of useful information and should be among the first places you turn to get a question answered (www.blackberry.com/developers/resources). Among other things, the knowledge base, developer documentation (including development guidelines, white papers, and online versions of the Javadocs), tutorials, and videos are all very useful.

Forums

Several useful developer forums exist. The first one to check is the official BlackBerry Support Community Forms—specifically the Developer Forums at www.blackberry.com/developers/forum. There are multiple forums on this link, all related to BlackBerry app development. Some are very active. You’ll see a Java Development forum on this link, and if you can’t find an answer there, posting a question will usually at least put you in touch with someone who’s had the same problem.

In addition to the official forums, a couple of third parties host fairly active developer forums, including BlackBerryForumsat www.blackberryforums.com/developer-forum/ and CrackBerry.com at http://forums.crackberry.com/app-developers-f9/.

BlackBerry Conferences

Every year, Research In Motion holds a BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, California in late October or early November. It’s worth attending in order to learn about BlackBerry programming—and the BlackBerry platform in its entirety. It’s also where RIM unveils new products and services or announces major updates to the BlackBerry API. You can find more information at www.blackberrydevcon.com.

RIM also hosts BlackBerry World every year in Orlando, Florida and typically in early May. The conference is mostly attended by representatives of big companies that use BlackBerry Enterprise Server and it’s a great place to network if you have a compelling application, especially one for enterprise users. Find more information at www.blackberryworld.com.

OpenGL on the BlackBerry

If you are interested in developing games using OpenGL or you have an existing application built using OpenGL from other platforms and want to port to BlackBerry, check out RIM’s guide at http://docs.blackberry.com/en/developers/deliverables/17967/OpenGL_1236721_11.jsp.

Newsletters, Blogs, and Other Resources

All developers should subscribe to the BlackBerry Developer newsletter. It’s free and delivers a new issue monthly; go to www.blackberry.com/DeveloperUpdates/.

There are a few useful blogs, too. RIM recently launched its own BlackBerry Developer’s Blog at www.blackberry.com/developers/blog. It gives you the inside scoop from developers at RIM about a variety of development topics. The Inside BlackBerry blog can also be useful for general happenings with BlackBerry; see http://blogs.blackberry.com. Finally, Anthony Ritz maintains a blog called Thinking BlackBerry at www.thinkingblackberry.com/.

The official web sites for this book offer the source code for all of the examples, errata, and other recent information. You can visit the Apress site (the publisher of this book) at www.apress.com/9781430230151. Or, you can visit our web site at www.beginningblackberry.com. If you can’t find an answer to your question, contact us through our web site, and we’ll do our best to help solve your problem!

Farewell

That’s all! Thanks for reading to the end, and best of luck with all your BlackBerry development in the future!