http://www.webrtc.org/reference/architecture

I would like take this opportunity and introduce you to our good friends at Hookflash who have successfully ported all major components of both WebRTC and Open Peer libraries to BlackBerry 10. To provide a brief overview, WebRTC is an open source multimedia & network stack that supports real-time audio & video. The value Open Peer delivers to WebRTC applications is peer-to-peer (P2P) signalling on the wire, Instant Messaging, Federated Identities and multiple mobile platform support.

So why is this so important?  Well, it enables developers to build rich, compelling, real-time communication applications integrating Social Identities with Voice, Video and Messaging using BlackBerry 10 Native SDK. Secondly, WebRTC is free to use if you decide to commercialize your application. What Hookflash has achieved on BlackBerry 10 really exemplifies the power of our BlackBerry 10 Native Platform to deliver the best communications experience.

I would like to further highlight Hookflash team’s experience in porting both WebRTC and Open Peer stack’s over to BlackBerry 10 platform. Check out my interview with Erik Lagerway (Co-founder) & Robin Raymond (Chief Architect) from Hookflash below:

What is Hookflash?

Hookflash is a globally distributed software development team building “Open Peer”, new “open” video, voice and messaging specification and software for mobile platforms and web browsers.  Open Peer enables an important new evolution of communications; Open, for developers and customers to create with. “Over-the-top” on the Internet, where users control their economics and quality of service. “Federated Identity” so user’s connections aren’t limited by service provider’s walled gardens and operating systems. “Integrated”, as communications become a native function in software and applications. Hookflash founders, lead developers and Advisors accomplishments include; creators of the world’s most popular softphones, built audio technology acquired and used by Skype, built GIPS technology acquired and open sourced by Google to create WebRTC, and engaged in WebRTC standards development in the IETF and W3C.

What is Open Peer SDK and how would this empower BlackBerry 10 developers?

Open Peer enables direct integration of social identities, video, voice and messaging communications for developers building native BlackBerry 10 (NDK) applications. Voice, video and messaging flow Over The Top (OTT) via the Internet.

These services are delivered peer-to-peer (P2P) providing extremely strong privacy, security and encryption. Open Peer enables federated identities and allows developers to leverage and integrate whatever identity model they currently have, so their users remain their users!

What features does Open Peer SDK support?

The Open Peer SDKs are built according to the Open Peer specification. Here are a few of the features we have built into the current SDKs…

• HD real-time video
• Wideband voice and messaging
• Peer-to peer signalling & media transport (greater efficiency, reliability & privacy)
• Federated identity for cross-platform communications (not to be confused with Single Sign-On)
• Encrypted & secure communications

Would HTML5/WebWorks developers be able to leverage this in BlackBerry 10?

Yes. The current SDK is for BB10 NDK developers at this time. However, we have an active “opjs” project under development that will allow interaction between a native BB10 application and an HTML5/WebRTC enabled browser thus allowing web applications to communicate directly with native BB10 applications.

Share your experience in cross compiling your code for BlackBerry 10

Like all platforms, there’s is a learning curve relative to what you are used to until you find yourself comfortable in a new environment, and BB10/QNX is no different. The richness to the platform experience is impressive on the BB10 and made iOS feel somewhat dated by comparison.

Since QNX is a POSIX compliant system, it was relatively easy to get a majority of open source code ported to BlackBerry 10. The QNX GCC-compliant mode has helped us as well.

There were a few wrinkles along the way. The documentation and NDK felt young compared to other more established platforms but that kind of level of documentation grows out of community support and interaction.

One major difference between this project and other platforms has been the phenomenal support that Blackberry has provided us as developers, especially as Hookflash is pushing the platform and technology harder than most with real time communications in audio and video. This was refreshing, We’ve never seen such incredible support for their developer community.

Have you ported over the entire webRTC engine to BlackBerry?

Yes, we have ported all major components of webRTC library to BlackBerry. We will be extending what is offered by WebRTC’s library as well.

How long did it take to port the WebRTC and Open Peer code to Blackberry 10?

When you consider the size of the code-base that had to be moved, and the fact we had not worked on QNX /  Blackberry 10 before, it went relatively quickly. The entire move took us approximately 90 days.

Are you going to commit this work back upstream to WebRTC project?

Yes, our code will migrate back to the WebRTC project. Hookflash is extremely busy on a number of fronts making Open Peer widely available with limited resources.  We appreciate help from other developers. Pushing the WebRTC codebase back upstream will be of tremendous value to the Blackberry developer community. Requests to join our Open Peer BB10 github project are always appreciated.

What APIs did you use to build your application on BlackBerry 10?

NDK’s audio, camera and rendering subsystems and Boost are the bulk of the components. We use Cascades/QT for the sample application.

Do you have VP8 Video working on BlackBerry 10?

Yes. We had some difficulty getting the assembly to compile properly but with Blackberry’s support we were successful in porting an optimized version of VP8 to the BB10 platform. Keep in mind we have tested this mostly on Z devices at this time with limited testing done on the Q devices.

How was your experience relative to working with other platforms and BlackBerry 10?

As mentioned earlier, Blackberry feels a bit new in the documentation area and there are still a few bugs to take care of in the platform. Having said that, the platform is forward thinking, flexible and impressively powerful. Blackberry’s support has been beyond anything we could have hoped and even expected.

As more developers are drawn to the platform, documentation and community involvement will improve the access to information on the platform and increase the samples available to draw upon.

For such a new entrant into the market, our team is thoroughly impressed.

How was your experience working with the RIM team?

Bar-none, the best support we’ve ever had from a major platform vendor directly into the project. Kudos to RIM / Blackberry for providing such a spectacular community outreach.

When is Open Peer SDK going to be available for BlackBerry 10?

Our SDK is ready now in beta, developers can get it on Github today. We continue to polish this and our other toolkits, we expect commercialization to begin later this year. Follow us on github and twitter to get the latest news on Hookflash and Open Peer development.

I hope you found this interview informative and useful.  If you have any questions or feedback please leave a comment below or reach out to me directly on Twitter _GurtejSandhu. Kudos to Hookflash team for making this all happen.

Last year we started sharing roadmaps for our tools and APIs with our community, and now we’re looking to give that information a bit more color. Sure, there’s a little bit of information on the roadmaps talking about what the features will entail, but we don’t usually get the chance to explain them in more detail.

Of course, we could create long blog articles to try and cover the “ins” and “outs” of the functionality, but that can be a little bit tedious. So we figured we could do something a little different and frankly just a little bit weird. We decided to give you some background on the features as part of a video blog series. Now you may ask, what’s weird about that… well, you’ll have to watch the videos to find out.

We’ll be running this video series leading up to BlackBerry Jam Americas in Orlando to give some more background of some of the topics that we’ll be discussing at length during the conference.

This first video will give you some information surrounding the different roadmap items that we’re looking at for improvements in our Momentics tooling.

I hope you enjoy the series and find the information both useful and entertaining!

Our SDKs (both API and tooling) remain gold as of the previous release and we have not introduced any new API or tooling changes in this release.  However, that being said, we continue to build new versions of the BlackBerry 10 device software that contain various bug fixes and stability improvements.  Our BlackBerry 10 software is being tested by over 150 carriers around the world and as they provide feedback we continue to release software incorporating this feedback.

What this means is that even though our API signatures and tooling are not changing; the underlying device software will go through a continuous improvement cycle. As an app developer you will want to upgrade to the latest software on your BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device in order to get the latest fixes as well as perform some sanity testing with your app to make sure there are no unexpected issues.  If you are trying to debug your app on the latest and greatest device release, you will likely want to pick up the latest Native SDK target OS so that you can get the right libraries and symbols for debugging on the latest version of device software that you are working with.

The good news is that you can download the the latest Native SDK target OS via the Update Manager that we provide as part of our Momentics IDE suite. If you click on Help in the menu bar, you will see an item that says ‘Update Native SDK’.

Once you click on Update Native SDK, you will see a dialog pop up that provides a list of Native SDK targets OS releases you can download. The latest Native SDK target OS as of the time of writing of this blog article is BlackBerry 10 Native SDK 10.0.9.2318. You should see this in the list.  Select it via the checkbox, click Next and follow the steps to download the latest Native SDK target OS.

As we get closer to the launch date of our device and the gold release of our BlackBerry 10 device software we want to make sure that you have the latest BlackBerry 10 Native SDK target to test and debug with on your BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices.  As we build new iterations of our OS software, we will continue to release these to you via our Update Manager so you can keep up with the most recent versions.

BlackBerry 10 is known to be one of the most open platforms out there right now. The Native SDK is available for all three operating systems, including GNU/Linux. I’m one of the GNU/Linux fans; Linux had introduced me to the world of UNIX and POSIX. Because QNX is POSIX-compliant, the development tools play well with the Linux environment.

Linux installation varies from computer to computer; there will be some differences in experience when installing BlackBerry 10 SDK. I will highlight some of these differences below and guide you through to make your Linux box a full-fledged BlackBerry 10 Native Development Workstation.

The Linux I am using is Ubuntu Linux 12.10 64-bit. I use the 64-bit distro because it’s the distro with a few issues needing to be resolved before the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK can be used. Furthermore, it’s also the system I use as the build server for my personal projects.

Let’s start with the first potential issue:

Issue #1: Cannot connect to device

BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha uses TCP/IP over USB to communicate with the host computer (i.e. your computer). However, sometimes it doesn’t work. If you face this problem, you need to set your handset as Windows Connection manually.

To test if the connection is running well, ping the IP address of the device while in development mode.

Issue #2: Cannot run the Native SDK Linux installer

The installer of BlackBerry 10 is built in a Java platform that runs in 32-bit infrastructure; it uses 32-bit GNU Standard C and C++ library, which isn’t installed in 64-bit Linux by default. Therefore, it will say something like “cannot find /path/to/tmp/java”. If you try to find it, it’s there. The error happens because the 32-bit Java runtime can’t be executed; the 32-bit libraries are missing. So we need to install it first. To do that, use apt-get or aptitude command:

$ sudo aptitude install libc6:i386 libstdc++6:i386

After that, execute the installer. Don’t forget to make the installer executable after download:

$ chmod u+x ./ installer-bbndk-bb10_0_09-linux-1673-201212072306-201212091625.bin
$ ./installer-bbndk-bb10_0_09-linux-1673-201212072306-201212091625.bin

Voila! The error is gone.

Issue #3: Cannot run Momentics

Momentics is the name of the IDE to create Native Apps on BlackBerry 10. It’s also built on Eclipse on 32-bit Java Platform. The installer embeds the runtime to the NDK. However, some libraries are missing so it can’t be started. It turns out that it needs 32-bit X11 and GTK+Pango libraries. So we need to install it to be able to run the Momentics IDE.

$ sudo aptitude install libatk1.0-0:i386 libc6:i386 libcairo2:i386 libexpat1:i386 libffi6:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libgcc1:i386 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0:i386 libglib2.0-0:i386 libgtk2.0-0:i386 libpango1.0-0:i386 libpcre3:i386 libpixman-1-0:i386 libpng12-0:i386 libselinux1:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libx11-6:i386 libxau6:i386 libxcb1:i386 libxcb-render0:i386 libxcb-shm0:i386 libxcomposite1:i386 libxcursor1:i386 libxdamage1:i386 libxdmcp6:i386 libxext6:i386 libxfixes3:i386 libxi6:i386 libxinerama1:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libxrender1:i386 libxtst6:i386 zlib1g:i386

And try to run the IDE by executing command line (adapt the paths of your bbndk installation, mine is in ${HOME}/bbndk/)

$ ~/bbndk/bbndk.sh

Now you’ll be able to code and run your Native/Cascades apps on Linux.

Happy coding, folks! Don’t forget to submit your applications before January 21, 2013 and be the first of apps to be discovered and used by BlackBerry 10 users!

Update – Brian Scheirer pointed out that there have been some awesome community samples too! -Ed.

For me, 2012 has definitely been a year of helping developers learn about our native and Cascades development tools. If you’re like me, you’re probably spending the holiday nights doing some coding – so I’ve put together this list of “The Best of Native Development for 2012″.

Cascades Webcasts
Thousands of developers from across the globe joined us for four webcasts to learn beginner to advanced Cascades concepts.  We were able to interact with developers directly, answer questions, and get immediate feedback as samples and code were displayed.  The format proved so successful that we’ve hosted many more webcasts on topics such as the BBM social platform, augmented reality apps, and OpenGL integration.

The live web casts were recorded and are available for viewing here.

Porting Guides
If you have existing content for another platform, we are making it easy to bring that content to the BlackBerry 10 platform.  Being able to re-use code across platforms reduces development and maintenance costs.  Distributing your application to multiple platforms opens you up to whole new market segments and increases your potential user base.  There a number of informative porting guides available to help you build for BlackBerry 10.

• iOS to BlackBerry 10 - 
  http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/12/porting-ios-apps-to-blackberry-10/
  
• Android to BlackBerry 10 - 
  http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/11/porting-android-game-to-blackberry-10/
  
• Qt to BlackBerry 10 - 
  http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/11/porting-qt-apps-to-blackberry-10/
  

Samples
The best and easiest way to learn to program is to look at sample code.  For every feature that BlackBerry 10 offers there is a sample project showing you how to put it into action.  Whether it’s integrating with BBM, using the Invocation Framework, getting sensor information, or communicating via Bluetooth, we’ve got you covered.

There are samples built right into the Momentics development environment, on the Cascades and Native microsites, and hosted on our github repo.  And if you find a feature that we missed, or an API without a clear example then let us know on Twitter @BlackBerryDev or in our developer forums and we’ll add what you need to get started!

• Cascades Samples - 
  https://github.com/blackberry/Cascades-Samples
  
• Native SDK Samples - 
  https://github.com/blackberry/NDK-Samples
  
• Cascades Microsite - 
  https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/sampleapps/
  

Stump the BlackBerry Devs
In August we launched a challenge to the BlackBerry Developer community to come up with a UI that would be difficult to implement in the Cascades UI framework.  The Cascades tools development team would try to implement the submissions in a flexible manner that could handle multiple screen resolutions and form factors.  They implemented three of the challenges and presented the solutions during the Unconference Day at BlackBerry Jam Americas.  We were able to show that Cascades is robust framework that is able to create stunning interfaces even when faced with challenging design requirements.  All the solutions are hosted on ourgithub repo.

If you have any Cascades or native dev questions – check out our forums and connect with me on Twitter.

Everyone loves a good webinar. OK, perhaps that’s an overstatement. Nevertheless, we hear loud and clear that our developer community loves them. The series of webinars we have run throughout the summer in conjunction with each successive SDK release have been extremely successful. So why stop now? Tomorrow – Tuesday, December 18th – we are bringing you two webinars that will cover all the latest information related to gold release Native and HTML5 SDKs for BlackBerry 10. The launch event date is coming up fast, so head on over to the registration pages and mark your calendars.

BlackBerry 10 Native SDK

We will take a quick look at what we have achieved so far with our native SDK. We will then look at the latest and greatest API and tooling features that have arrived in this most recent beta as well as the beta that preceded it. This includes things like advertising, SMS and invocation framework enhancements. Also, for the first time you will get a quick preview of the cards that are available to invoke and how you can invoke them. We will also cover some of the important IDE enhancements that have arrived, including the update manager, a brand new spanking project wizard, and the latest and greatest features that have been added to the Microsoft Visual Studio Plugin.

REGISTRATION:

http://www.blackberrydeveloperevents.com/events/webcast/registration/register.html?scoid=1079239157

BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK

We’ll take a look at the latest gold release as well as the most recent beta that preceded it. Starting with a quick overview of BlackBerry WebWorks, we will move to a summary of all of the latest features. We will then dive deeper into some of the more interesting features with a live look at code and functioning samples.

REGISTRATION:

http://www.blackberrydeveloperevents.com/events/webcast/registration/register.html?scoid=1079318388

One thing we heard over and over again during the BlackBerry® Got Game Port-a-Thon was that developers loved getting almost instant responses to their questions from one of the many members of our Developer Relations team.  Why stop a good thing?  Starting Wednesday, November 21^st and continuing right up until January 30^th, we’ll have be offering live time in the forums, where you can expect to get responses as quickly as we can type them.

How will it work?

Two hours a week, every week, we’ll address one of the developer audiences listed below.  We know we have an active developer community, and we want you to participate.  Since there’s no way to lock a forum thread, we’ll go low tech: if you know the answer to a question and you intend to respond to it, simply reply to the thread indicating “got it” then go ahead and type your response.  This simple claim of ownership will prevent multiple devs from responding to the same question at the same time.  And as per usual in the developer forums, if your question was answered, mark it as “solved” or if you see a good response, put a “like” on it.  Basically, just give recognition to those who deserve it.

When and where?

Mondays:
Marmalade: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in Marmalade’s developer forums.
Sencha: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in Sencha’s developer forums.

Tuesdays:
Cascades™ – BlackBerry Java porting to BlackBerry 10: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.
PhoneGap: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.

Wednesdays:
Qt: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.
jQuery: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in jQuery’s developer forums.

Thursdays:
BlackBerry WebWorks™: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.
Android: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in Stack Overflow.

Fridays:
AIR: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.

Watch for more time slots to be added in the near future to better accommodate our developers in Asia-Pacific.  See you in the forums!

Yesterday was a long day spent scrutinizing every aspect of developer experience, tools and application development. We have filled out the whiteboard and have summarized the main points:

1. Platform Choice is a bit confusing (we need some more explaining here)
2. Technology/Tools line of separation is unclear. Why would I choose C/C++/Qt/Cascades™? (If I’m a Qt developer, this may seem like a familiar world – yet Cascades is different. We need a better way to highlight this)
3. We have found distinct documents for accomplishing the same task (and not all paths gave the same result). This duplication needs to go.
4. For the Gaming/Native SDK developers, the End-To-End flow experience is broken. From start to finish there are too many issues before a game can be deployed.
5. There is little guidance when the IDE is launched. What should I do next? Create a Native or Cascades application. The Wizards could use some wizardry and help to get the developer a few steps closer to the app they really want.
6. We realized we need better integration of IDE, Wizards and Online Docs to focus on getting started and highlighting ‘Key’ samples. We’d all like to see a few key samples for gaming and apps and a clear path to get them running right from the IDE.
7. Our open source developers found that the path of navigating between Open Source libraries and development environment needs to be improved. It’s not made clear how a library could be integrated into the IDE.
8. Our new folks were often using search engines to query for BlackBerry® specific development tasks. We have found that this also needs to be improved. Wouldn’t it be cool if search results for “break points BlackBerry® 10” or “touch inputs BlackBerry 10” actually gave links to our documents?
9. As much as things have improved in the signing key world, we still have found a lot of pain points there. Folks kept forgetting the multiple pin/passwords that they had and having to re-register. Security, can we not just have a single pin/password?
10. The device discovery, simulator availability and generally having the IDE notified what’s connected needs to improve. (When on VPN we could use a notification that a device can’t connect)

And one more thing: We have found that a lot of us in the room were looking for pre-baked recipes that contain both documentation and samples. We could all benefit from a few recipes (ie. top 10 things you’ll most likely need when doing cascades development). What do you think?

We have also found bugs, which we’ll be tracking and following up on. A more detailed summary will follow next week. Meanwhile, we are interested to know what you think.

In the room we have folks playing the roles of new Cascades™ developers. Some are trying to approach development from the point of view of open source developers. We have gamers looking at developing games. There are those wearing iOS developer hats and looking to bring existing apps to BlackBerry. We have developers and product managers from the Czech Republic and Sweden joining us online.

We hope that these diverse perspectives will help us better understand the experiences of developers starting out with BlackBerry development.

We all started on
http://developer.blackberry.com
and at the outset we had a debate on whether it’s clear on what technology a developer should use. After clicking C/C++ the debate continued. What does the sponge cake represent? Why do we need to differentiate technologies right away when a single IDE has them all? As an iOS developer do I go to porting heaven or do I choose Cascades? Can I have Raw OS access, be Open Source friendly and interact with Bluetooth sensors when I choose Cascades? We were a bit confused on what choice to make and why and we’ll take that feedback to improve the site.

Tell us your thoughts on getting started with BlackBerry 10 Native development. You can follow what’s going on here by following  @BlackBerryDev, using hashtag #BBDevXP.

The day continues….

We have our team assembled here in Mississauga, Ontario ready to start experiencing what it is to be an AIR developer for BlackBerry® 10. We will be wearing the hats of a developer that uses Flash Builder, one that uses Powerflasher FDT, and one that has a game already built using Flash Professional and would like to port it over to BlackBerry 10. We’ll be installing the SDK and experiencing what it is like for everything from:

• Creating a BlackBerry App World™ storefront vendor account
• Getting signing keys
• Downloading and installing the tools
• Downloading and installing the SDK
• Downloading and installing the simulator and what the experience is like using it to test applications

We’ll be logging bugs and annoyances we find along the way all in an effort to make the AIR development experience for BlackBerry 10 better.

If you would like to participate please help us by posting bugs in the Developer Issue Tracker, or an easier way to participate is to submit your experience in the forums. You can follow what’s going on here by following @DustinMalik, or @BlackBerryDev, using hashtag #BBDevXP.