Dedicated to BlackBerry Development

This book is designed to help new or experienced mobile developers learn how to build mobile applications for the BlackBerry platform. The target audience for this book is developers who don’t know where to get started with BlackBerry development or developers who have dabbled a bit in BlackBerry development but still want to know more. It is my intention with this book to skip administrative topics and focus entirely on development related topics.

A developer must have a thorough understanding of the features, capabilities and even limitations of a platform in order to build useful, effective and efficient applications. The BlackBerry applications platform has unique capabilities that take a lot of the work off of the shoulders of the developer. The book will provide an overview of the back-end server components that simplify and optimize communication with back-end data sources plus dig deeply into the different options for building BlackBerry applications. Special care will be given to the concept of determining which application platform is best for particular application types.

The reader will leave this book with an understanding of the power and flexibility of the BlackBerry application platform and how to build applications that leverage it. The book is for both consumer and enterprise developers – developers building web-based applications or Java applications for the device. The book will also cover tactics the developer can use to make the best use of the device processing capabilities, device memory, network connectivity and battery life – the things that will make the application appear to be faster and will make the user happier.