Looking Back on One Year of RIM Open Source Repositories

Eduardo P-L. — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:45:02 +0000

Tomorrow is the first day of BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011. A year ago, at BlackBerry DevCon 2010, RIM released our first RIM-sponsored Open Source project, the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ runtime for BlackBerry smartphone OS at GitHub using ASL2. At that time we promised additional releases… and we followed through. Today we have 8 web-related repositories in the web space:

Two runtimes: BlackBerry WebWorks for BlackBerry smartphone OS and the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet
Corresponding API Documentation for each runtime
A growing number of Code Samples, including the code for Aura, the BlackBerry WebWorks based demo shown at BlackBerry Developer Day at this year’s Mobile World Congress
Alice, a micro-library focusing on fancy visual effects using CSS3 2D and 3D facilities – to see it in action, point your modern browser to the demo page
A community owned repository containing JavaScript Extensions for BlackBerry WebWorks
Two repositories for our Ripple Emulator: one for the UI, and one for the Framework.

Open Source is changing how we interact with the BlackBerry WebWorks community in many ways, including:

The samples are now directly usable, with a clear, well-known (ASL2) license, and in a location we can update easily – our plan is to take all existing useful samples, currently in places like Knowledge Base articles, mail threads, forums, or posts, and post them as Open Source.
When we wanted to add BlackBerry WebWorks support to Nitobi PhoneGap, Ken and the team travelled to Vancouver and leveraged that both projects are open source. This is especially useful to us now that Nitobi is contributing PhoneGap to start incubating Apache CallBack.
When Laurent and Jim want to add new features to Alice, they can change the repository directly… and the demos are available right then. And all the GitHub features are available from Fork-me to Watchers.
Tim, Ken and the team can make new experimental features available via the BlackBerry WebWorks Community APIs
And we can have a continuous release for both the runtimes and the tools. You can even check our Roadmap.

Year two is just beginning and we will continue our commitment to providing more source code to the community, contributing to other OSS projects as well as a focus on performing our daily development in the open.

Do you believe that support for open source projects is important? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Looking Back on One Year of RIM Open Source Repositories