One of the best resources for new BlackBerry® developers is the BlackBerry Knowledge Base, a database of great technical articles on various aspects of the BlackBerry platform. Among the BlackBerry Developer Relations team, particularly useful Knowledge Base articles receive a lot of attention and get passed around faster than a good joke. My good buddy Neil tipped me off to this Knowledge Base article he’s been fond of lately, entitled “How-To Develop Applications for different BlackBerry® Device Software versions and BlackBerry Smartp…” Check out the article abstract below:
This article discusses how to develop applications for different BlackBerry Device Software versions and BlackBerry smartphone models without restricting the application to the lowest common functionality. A number of methods are shown allowing access to the latest application programming interfaces (APIs). The following is an outline of the topics in this article.
Background
- Forward compatibility of BlackBerry Device Software versions
- Best practices for BlackBerry® Java® Development Environment builds
Approaches to Minimize Code Variations
- Selecting alternate String properties
- Including multiple methods and using separate compilers
- Using libraries to support different implementations
- Using libraries to support incremental functionality
- Using the preprocessor to target new APIs from one source
Appendices
- A: Determining BlackBerry smartphone model and code level
- B: Managing installation of multiple builds
Post a comment if you found this Knowledge Base article useful, or if there are any other Knowledge Base articles we should talk about.
