Create a simple J2ME application for Blackberry with WebSphere Studio Device Developer

Added 31 Jul 2008

Introduction:

Having employees constantly connected to one's enterprise is vital to many companies. This is one of the reasons Research in Motion's BlackBerry has mustered a massive following (over three million users at the time of this article's writing) in recent years. BlackBerry addiction has become pandemic. In this article, you'll learn how to build, test, and deploy applications to Blackberry devices using WebSphere Studio Developer.

WebSphere Studio Device Developer (hereafter called Device Developer) provides you with an integrated development environment (IDE) in which you can build, test, and deploy J2ME applications.

For learning purposes, the sample MIDlet application you'll create following the steps in this article is pretty simple: it takes input text from a user, transposes the text, then displays the transposed text to the user. For example, if a user enters the text IBM, the transposed, or mirrored, text MBI is returned.

Prerequisites

The BlackBerry Java development environment (JDE), which runs only on Windows® operating systems, consists of an IDE and BlackBerry emulator tools that let you see exactly how the J2ME application you build will work on a BlackBerry device. In this article, we'll use the Device Developer IDE rather than the IDE that ships with the BlackBerry JDE. However, you still need to download and install the BlackBerry JDE in order to use the BlackBerry emulation environment. This way, you can see how your J2ME application will act on the actual BlackBerry device. See Resources for information on downloading the BlackBerry JDE.

You also need to have the following software installed:

Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition V5.0
WebSphere Studio Device Developer. Device Developer is part of the IBM WorkSpace Client Technology, Micro Edition 5.7 Integrated Package. Check out Resources for information on downloading a trial version of Device Developer.

You should have a basic knowledge of Eclipse and the BlackBerry JDE.