Blackberry App for OS 7.0 and earlier, with blackberry 10 support

Question

I have to develop a BlackBerry application which runs on all the devices running blackberry OS 7.0 and earlier, and can run on BlackBerry 10 devices, too. How can I do that?

Is a WebWorks application able to support all the above platforms? If yes, there's no IDE for WebWorks development .. how shall I code for that?

Answer 1

WebWorks supports BlackBerry OS 5.0+, BlackBerry PlayBook OS, and BlackBerry 10.

Regarding HTML5 featuers, this is dependent on the OS version. For instance, BlackBerry OS 5.0 is a proprietary browser implementation and does not support Ajax requests. BlackBerry OS 6.0 is WebKit-based, but is an older version of the engine when compared to something like a BlackBerry 10 device. So you'll need to be mindful of which HTML(5) features and functionality are supported on the various platforms.

That being said, if you have a shared HTML5 "base", that can be (re)packaged with the WebWorks SDK for Smartphones (BBOS), Tablet OS SDK (PlayBook), and BB10 SDK. Each will create an application that runs in the respective environment: Java, AIR, Native.

If you start looking at WebWorks APIs (i.e. JavaScript APIs that tie down to the native layer for functionality beyond HTML5; BBM integration for one), then you will need to leverage the API docs to see which APIs can be used with which SDK. There may be differences in implementation, or even availability, of various APIs depending on your platform.

HTML5 provides the most common "base" for re-use, but you will still need to be mindful of each platform's limitations and differences.

There is no WebWorks IDE, you can use whichever IDE you like to create your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS resources. The SDK is then leveraged to "package" those resources into a BlackBerry application for the corresponding platforms.

Answer 2

The HTML5 BlackBerry Developer page should have all the information that you need to start creating WebWorks applications. As that page mentions, you can choose to target all of BB10, BB7, and the Playbook OS with WebWorks.

Answer 3

Webworks can target OS 7.0, Playbook and BB10. You just have to download the SDK for the version you want to deploy to. Be mindful that each platform has platform specific APIs that need to be managed if you use them (like using NFC in BB10, etc). This is actually the reason why there are multiple versions of the SDKs. Each SDK exposes native features of the given platform to HTML5.

As for Development. The easiest way to get started is to use Phonegap. Their documentation is pretty thorough and they have scripts that deploy things for you and manage your directory structure, Manage your pins, and keys, developer tokens, etc.