The BlackBerry® WebWorks™ SDK for Tablet OS Beta has been progressing very well, many thanks in part due to your continued feedback. If you haven’t done so already, please update to the latest Beta of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS. Important architectural changes have been implemented in v1.0.0.23 of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK, so developers will need to re-compile existing applications using this SDK in order for them to successfully run on the new BlackBerry® Tablet OS simulator v.0.9.4.

What’s new in this release?

Our development teams have been very active since the last release, and have made some terrific enhancements in the capabilities, stability and performance of the Beta3 version of the SDK. Some notable improvements include:

• Code signing enabled – you can now secure your application using the BlackBerry code signing process for BlackBerry Tablet OS. Learn more about signing your applications.
• AJAX support for local context. This fix improves the quality of support for using AJAX to retrieve local resources. A benefit of this fix includes improved support on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet for JavaScript® frameworks like jQuery.
• Loading screen image – Developers can define a loading screen and transition effect in their config.xml file to improve the user experience during application startup.
• Major improvements in Mac support – Absolute paths now allowed in ZIP archive; _MACOSX folder no longer being included in BAR file; Format of bbwp command line arguments changed from “-“ to “/”.

As always, please refer to the release notes for information about what has been improved in the current release.

Installation Tips

If you do not have any previous version of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK development tools installed, please follow the “Getting Started” guides for Windows® or Mac. Otherwise, existing developers are reminded that they must uninstall any previous versions of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS before upgrading. To make this step easy, you can find an “Uninstall BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for PlayBook.exe” utility within the /bbwp folder of the installation folder.

Adding additional versions of the BlackBerry Tablet OS simulator to VMWare® player is completed using the exact same steps followed when you first installed a BlackBerry Tablet OS virtual machine. As a friendly reminder, developers do not need to delete previous versions of the BlackBerry Tablet OS simulator. These can be kept installed in case you wish to troubleshoot behavior between the multiple BlackBerry Tablet OS versions.

Once you have updated to the latest version of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS, you can quickly restore code signing functionality simply by updating your bbpw.properties file and generating the sigtool.p12 file, as documented in the Configure signing for tablet applications guide.

What to expect next

We’re not finished yet! Developers can continue to expect improvements to be added to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS in the coming weeks as we get closer to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet launch date in the U.S and Canada.

Feedback

If you have questions or concerns, discovered a bug, or even have a great idea for a new feature at any point in your development lifecycle, we want to hear from you! Whether positive or negative, we do want your feedback as it helps to make this platform great.

For questions or comments, send us a message via Twitter® or the Web Community Forums. For bug reports or feature enhancement requests, submit an item using the Developer Issue Tracker.

Sincere thanks to everyone who joined us for the “Developing using the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ SDK” Webcast series. The recordings for each session of the webinar are available to access online. If you haven’t already done so, please schedule some time to set aside and watch them at your own convenience.

During this series, attendees were presented with a variety of topics, code samples and best practices. The goals of each of these sessions were to provide developers with new information they can use to build great applications for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, as well as enabling them to share the knowledge they learn within their own development communities. Here’s an overview of what each webcast covered:

Webcast Part 1 – Getting Started: Discover the purpose and capabilities of the BlackBerry WebWorks platform. Learn how to setup your development environment and build a “Hello World” application. Understand how to configure and deploy applications to a BlackBerry® Tablet OS virtual machine.

Webcast Part 2 – My First App: Learn how to add visual enhancements and application functionality to your BlackBerry Tablet OS applications using BlackBerry WebWorks. Discover how easy it can be to leverage existing assets in constructing your application. Become more confident and efficient at using the development tools.

Webcast Part 3 – BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Integration: Understand what platform features and supported APIs exist that can be used to add functionality to your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications. Discover how to use the BlackBerry WebWorks JavaScript® APIs to integrate your application content with the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS.

Webcast Part 4 – User Interface Guidelines and Best Practices: Learn how to design great BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications that optimize the experience for your end users. Incorporate best practices and habits in your development processes to help reduce overall development and troubleshooting time of your BlackBerry WebWorks applications.

As always, our attendees were eager to participate in the discussion, and as a result we held extremely popular Q&A periods at the end of each webcast. Many of these questions have already been posted to the BlackBerry Web Development Community Forum (Webcast #1 Q&A summary and Webcast #2 Q&A summary); however, I wanted to paraphrase and share the five most popular questions asked:

What Web technologies can I use to develop my BlackBerry WebWorks application?
WebKit is the Web rendering engine used to power BlackBerry WebWorks applications on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (and BlackBerry® 6). For a complete listing of supported Web standards, please refer to the BlackBerry browser guides. This includes reference guides for HTML, CSS and JavaScript which detail supported features and elements. As well, developers can make use of custom JavaScript APIs from the BlackBerry WebWorks API collection to integrate their content with the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS.

How can I use assets from my existing Website, such as a MySQL® database, Web page or Service?
You can use all of this content in your app! A BlackBerry WebWorks application can connect directly to live Web content via direct HTTP or AJAX requests. By combining the power of Web-connected database with RESTful Web services, developers can produce very compelling applications!

What virtual machine players are available to use for running the BlackBerry Tablet OS?
We recommend that Windows developers use VMWare Player, and Mac developers use VMWare Fusion. Understanding that developers are interested in free tools – and that VMWare Fusion is a paid license – we also wanted to share that some Mac developers have reported success using the Open Source Virtual Box. That being said, it is very important to note that our product management and development teams have evaluated VirtualBox already and do not recommend it due to performance and security concerns.

Why does media (audio/video/flash) content not play in the BlackBerry Tablet OS simulator?
This is a known issue that we are working on resolving. The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet simulator currently does not have the proper media codecs necessary for playing audio/video from the BlackBerry Tablet OS. We are very interested in providing developers with this capability and are working closely with VMWare towards a solution.

I received when deploying my app to the BlackBerry Tablet OS simulator – why?
There are a couple possibilities. Please see the following Knowledge Base article for more info: Troubleshooting: Common failure reasons while deploying applications to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet simulator

Thanks again for your interest in using the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK to produce BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications! Please let me know how your development goes. If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, feel free to reply directly to this blog post, send a message via the Web Community Forums, or even mention @BlackBerryDev on Twitter®.

I just wanted to give you all an update to the Research In Motion® (RIM®) Open Source Software Projects on GitHub. We’ve just added both the Individual Contributor Agreement and the Corporate Contributor Agreement to the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ Open Source Software Project, which can be found on the individual repository wikis. Both of these contributor agreements will cover all RIM Open Source Software Projects on GitHub. This means that the community can now begin to participate in the contribution of both source code and bug fixes to the project! To view all the current contributors of the project, please see the contributor list.

We’ve also just posted the source code to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK and APIs for the BlackBerry® Tablet OS in the project. In January, we pushed up the source code to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK and APIs for the BlackBerry project, so we now have source code to both BlackBerry WebWorks platforms (BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet) up in the project. We will continue to update the source code in the projects with each release of the product, with the goal of having RIM development using the public GitHub repository on a frequent basis to store and build these products.

Also, we just updated the list of new APIs that the team is currently developing for the BlackBerry smartphone platform. We’ll keep this list up to date with our progress as we complete these APIs and move on to new ones. If you have APIs other than the ones we have on the list, please tell us by using the RIM Developer Forums for this project – or better yet, if you have an API that you’ve created and want to contribute it, please fork the code, add your API and push it to us for review!

Lastly, we are shooting to have some build scripts up around the end of March or the beginning of April. We know the community has been clamoring to have these build scripts so you can build your own source files from the project. We’re also working on getting some unit and functional tests up on the project site as well, but the important thing is we’re making some really good progress!

Looking forward to the community participation and helping us continue to build a compelling platform and product for you!

If your background and skills are in using web technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript®, then this is the platform for you! The platform extends some of the native device capabilities like system utilities, dialogs, and invoking other apps on the device and makes them available for you to use in your applications – helping them to become Super Apps!

Remember: this is still early access and the product team will be adding more and more capabilities from now until the launch of the device. The design and architectural principles for the BlackBerry WebWorks platform on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet were to keep as much in common as possible with the BlackBerry WebWorks platform on BlackBerry® smartphones. This means that apps written on one will work on the other; however some modification might be needed depending on the underlying device capabilities. For example the tablet may have characteristics like bringing up a native dialog box including various options like the size and appearance of the dialog on the PlayBook’s screen that aren’t on the smartphones. However, all of your HTML5, CSS and JavaScript code should all be compatible.

Also, we’ve released the source code to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet – please check it out and join the open source project. This is an opportunity for the larger developer community to get involved in shaping the future of this platform and tooling. So get involved!

And lastly, all BlackBerry PlayBook WebWorks applications that are submitted to BlackBerry App World™ are eligible for a FREE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet! To submit your apps, please go here, and see the terms and conditions here. To keep in touch with all the announcements and release information related to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, please enter your information here.

Thanks for your support!