BlackBerry Development Fundamentals

The BlackBerry Developers web site (www.blackberry.com/developers) contains a lot of information about how to build web applications for the BlackBerry browser and other articles that cover the topics in this chapter in greater detail.

Look for the Developer Knowledge Base article DB-00435 called ‘How To - Retrieve information about the BlackBerry Browser’ and article DB-00698 called ‘How To - Verify that the BlackBerry Browser data remains encrypted at all points between the BlackBerry smartphone and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.’

The BlackBerry Browser documentation site contains detailed information on every possible feature of the BlackBerry browser. Look for the BlackBerry Browser Content Developer’s Guide and, for more recent versions of the BlackBerry Device Software, the BlackBerry Browser JavaScript Reference Guide contain detailed information about all of the capabilities available to the browser via JavaScript. There are also HTML and CSS references available in the same location. Be sure to grab the right set of documentation for the lowest version of the BlackBerry Device Software you will be supporting – that will give you the best common denominator of features your applications can support.

There is also a wealth of information available online related to building web applications for mobile devices.  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published some very interesting guidelines for mobile web development:  Mobile Web Application Best Practices and Mobile Web Best Practices.

dotMobi is an organization providing everything related to the .mobi Internet top Level Domain (TLD). They have published a dotMobi Mobile Web Development Guide.

They also offer a free site testing application called ready.mobi. They also offer a product called Instant Mobilizer which allows an organization to automatically convert existing web sites into a mobile optimized version.  For more information, check out http://www.instantmobilizer.com and http://www.instantmobilizer.com/test-your-site.htm.

Through a related organization called mobiThinking they offer a free eBook called Marketing your small business on the mobile Web.

There are many mobile browser detection scripts available online as well. MobiForge, another rorganization related to dotMobi has several. There is a sample browser detection script in PHP located at http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/lightweight-device-detection-php and a sample ASP version located at http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/lightweight-device-detection-asp. You can also try http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi for another version.

There is even an open source project called PhoneGap that is building a cross-platform framework for device-neutral mobile development using JavaScript. Their tools are supposed to support BlackBerry, Apple iPhone and Google Android.