Blackberry Development - Any suggestions on references and tools?

Question

I'm looking for good reference materials and open to recommendations about good IDE tools that I can use to develop for the Blackberry. I've been to RIM's site and experimented with their IDE however as of my last use it had issues with Vista and user access control. Any direction on this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use Eclipse to develop for the Blackberry platform, using the Blackberry JDE plugin.

I've only played around with it personally, but had no issues (running Vista SP1 at the time).

Answer 2

I use a bit of an odd configuration: IntelliJ Idea for developing code (only because I've used it for years and I'm familiar with it and I use it for other parts of the system) and the BlackBerry JDE for running the simulators, debugging, attaching to devices, etc. For compiling and signing for deployment or uploading to devices, I use ant tasks. I know - strange - but it works. I may try the Eclipse plugin one of these days as I saw it demoed at WES 2009 and it looks quite nice.

As for the comments about Vista problems - I use the above dev tools fine on Vista 64 bit. There are just a few gotchas to get around:

1. Don't install the JDE or simulators in the default C:\Program Files folder, as they need to write to their own directory during runtime and Vista does not like the user accounts writing to any subdirectory under C:\Program Files. I install my JDE and simulators in C:\rim
2. If you're using a 64 bit OS, make sure you install the 32-bit Java SDK to run and compile with. The simulators and possibly the JDE have native 32-bit code in them that will not run with a 64-bit Java SDK.

Answer 3

I'd recommend developing in NetBeans or Eclipse. Either of those are far superior IDEs than the RIM JDE. I've used NetBeans for the past 9 months for Blackberry development with good success. In terms of reference material, I'd recommend using the Blackberry Java forum as your knowledgebase; almost every question I've come up with has been answered there.

Answer 4

I had issues using their emulators on vista as well. I'd look into installing xp/server 2003/(insert your favorite non-vista os here) on a vm, and using that as your dev environment (I highly recommend VMWare.)