|
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 10:16 |
|
RIM formally announced the new BlackBerry Tools for Web Developers . These tools had been in beta for a whlie and I got a chance to work with them while writing the book chapter around debugging web applications. The tools are a plug-in for Eclipse and another for Microsoft Visual Studio. They basically allow a web developer to build web applications (static or dynamic) and debug them on BlackBerry devices directly from within the IDE. The cool thing about them is that the debugger from either IDE connects to the device simulator through the debugger and allows developers to step through dynamic code (JavaScript, AJAX code using XMLHTTPRequest and more) while it runs in the simulator. If needed, it can also do the same thing directly through an USB-connection to a physical device. Way cool.
The thing I liked the most was the window that could be used to watch all traffic between the device and web server using XMLHTTPRequest. If I was building an AJAX application (I refuse to treat it as a word, it's an acronym), I'd need this tool to make debugging and troubleshooting as simple as possible.
|
BlackBerry 
I've played around with the various tools that are available for BlackBerry development with Eclipse. I would love to have one Eclipse extension that gives me everything I need including whatever I need for BlackBerry client development and web development. Oftentimes, you're building a BlackBerry client that happens to use http to communicate with the server and so you could use the monitor that comes with the BlackBerry Web Developer plugin. Not to mention that both plugins available today don't support the same version of Eclipse. Makes for a messy dev. env. How do you setup your dev. env?