At FITC Toronto this year, Dustin Malik and I presented a session for developers interested in WebGL — where it is today and where WebGL is headed. I made a promise to open source my WebGL sample (previously known as Webscape) and I’m happy to say that it’s available today!

Two months prior to FITC, I had very little personal experience with WebGL development. I spent two weeks researching WebGL technologies and frameworks with the ultimate goal being to pack as many topics that a typical WebGL game dev might come across into one sample.

Over the next week, I tried various WebGL frameworks. I managed to make quite a bit of progress using Three.js before I hit my first issue and realized that without knowing how WebGL works under the hood, I’d have a difficult time resolving my own issues. Imagine trying to debug a public framework like jQuery without having knowledge of JavaScript®.

So I started over, this time using pure WebGL as my approach and www.learningwebgl.com as my primary resource of information. The next three weeks saw the majority of my coding. I wanted to take the project as far as I could before the FITC conference.

In that time, I managed to implement forms of terrain generation and pathing, ambient and directional lighting, a skybox, virtual controls, and texture blending. It was an adventure, to say the least. I left a week for debugging and touch-ups, and then it was conference time.

Primarily, this sample is intended to be a learning resource. As such, it has been open sourced at our WebGL-Samples Github repository. Feel free to take it, rip it apart, and build up something grander. This sample is not perfect, but it does take a lot of concepts and brings them into one place. Feedback, questions, and contributions are all welcome. If you have your own projects you’re working on, I’d be ecstatic to see them!

Finally, I wanted to say thank you to the following people whose contributions to the online community helped me greatly along my way: Learning WebGL, Brandon Jones, Jerome Etienne, Chandler Prall, Andrea Giammarch, Paul Irish and Erik Möller, Ricardo Cabello, and the Valve Developer Community.

The tablets are in a fixed layout and each tablet knows its position in the wall. At a given time, the wall can be used to present pictures in different combinations of tablets, ranging from one picture per tablet to a single picture split the complete wall. The two pictures below show a 3×3 wall of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets displaying 9 different images, and then a single image split into 9 segments.

Have fun with the sample and let us know how you use it, or extend it. And remember, we welcome contributions back to our repositories on Github.

We know you need samples to learn from, borrow from, and modify. During the BlackBerry® 10 Jam in Orlando, we released many samples to help you start building for BlackBerry 10. More samples are in the queue but I wanted to give you a summary of the ones available today.

All code samples have been released under Open Source. Most of them use Apache Software License 2; a few use other licenses for different reasons.

Cascades™ - Samples released include:

• Cascades-Samples: This repository has most of the official Cascades samples. The samples come directly from the team designing Cascades and are infused with that TAT ‘style’. There are 15 samples. Samples were highlighted during the Super Jam session (video).
• Cascades-Community-Samples: These samples are contributions from the community. The first contribution corresponds to the demo from Macadamian presented during the Super Jam session. The demo shows how to integrate OpenGL with Cascades (video).

BlackBerry 10 Native SDK - Samples released include:

• Native SDK – Samples: The next branch of this repository now has the native samples for the BlackBerry 10 Native beta.
• Scoreloop™ – Samples: This repository contains a single example that shows integration of Scoreloop with the BPS Event System in the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.
• Gameplay: The game framework includes a samples directory. When Gameplay 1.2 was released, new samples were released too.

HTML5 - Samples released:

• PictureWall: This sample application shows how to display a collection of pictures onto a “wall” of BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
• bbUI.js: The update to this HTML5 library also includes additional samples. Also see the blog post introducing bbUI.js.
• jQuery-Mobile-Samples: This repository is being used to contribute to the jQuery Mobile Cookbook project.

Want to learn more? Check out the schedule for the BlackBerry 10 Jam RoadShow.

Supporting open standards and open source are keystones of the BlackBerry® platform. We are pleased to announce another repository of open source contributions through Github. Our 56th repository, jQuery-Mobile-Samples, will contain samples and tutorials using jQuery Mobile for building outstanding BlackBerry applications and mobile web experiences.

If you’ve done mobile web development, then jQuery will be familiar to you. It’s used by many organizations to make compelling websites and applications on the leading platforms. jQuery Mobile is a recent release focused on mobile devices with excellent cross-platform capabilities. With this repository we will be providing examples that detail some advanced features of the jQuery Mobile Framework which you will want to use in your next project.

Watch the repository on Github and you’ll see the first few tutorials with sample code appearing this month. Later in the roadmap are examples for using jQuery Mobile with other frameworks for even more opportunities to impress your users.

About a month ago, an extension I wrote to add BlackBerry® Analytics to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for smartphones was included in the Community APIs on GitHub, and just this past week, a community developer’s extension to support the Clipboard was added in BlackBerry WebWorks for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. Now if you want to use these extensions, you’ll need to download the source and add them to your SDK. Thankfully, this is quite simple to do.

Right in the Readme for the extension you will find instructions:

1. Download the source code from this repository and extract it to a location on your computer.
2. Using File Explorer, browse to the downloaded source code for this extension: Tablet\Clipboard.
3. Copy the downloaded Tablet\Clipboard\blackberry.clipboard directory to the extensions directory for the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS. The default path for this location is “C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\bbwp\ext”.

When you’ve done that, you can build applications with <feature id=”blackberry.clipboard” /> in the config.xml file.

When you add an extension to your SDK, you will see that there are quite a few already in the /ext directory. These core APIs form the basis of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK and its ability to go beyond the Browser. Since we’ve open sourced the SDK on Github, when an update is submitted for one of the core APIs, it’s just as easy to get the update for yourself.

For example, I submitted an update to the blackberry.utils API so that you can save Base64 encoded Strings as decoded binary Blobs, with the intention of saving Canvas data directly to the file system as an image file. Since this code isn’t part of the official codebase yet, if you want the code that does this in your SDK, go to the SDK on Github, and look at the Pull Requests.

If you click on the actual commit, you’ll see the code change, and you can view the actual file on Github.

If you click on the “Raw” button on the top right, you will get the actual file contents, so you can replace the Utilities.as file in your “C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\bbwp\ext\blackberry.utils\src\Air\Utilities\src\blackberry\utils” directory directly.

Visit the GitHub site today and get some more extensions to work with. You’ll be well on your way to expanding your BlackBerry WebWorks SDK into your own custom toolkit for outstanding HTML5 applications with native capabilities.

Giddy-up! We just launched new microsites to better serve the BlackBerry® developer community and have given BlackBerry Jam Zone a facelift to make it easy to navigate to the tools you want.

We wanted to re-build the main page to bring you the answers you’re looking for:

• How do I make money?
• What are the development platform options and which one is right for me?
• How do I participate in the community and collaborate with others?

Now new sites have been introduced for Adobe® AIR® and BlackBerry Java. Oh, and a BlackBerry Theme Studio website is on the way as well, so stay tuned…

Starting back at DevCon Americas we launched Native C/C++, Android Runtime and HTML5/WebWorks microsites designed to bring a targeted experience for these development audiences. These were just the beginning steps in updating our online tools to help you build for BlackBerry and PlayBook.

We built these microsites to:

• Bring all of the documentation, samples, tutorials, downloads and API references into one convenient, integrated location
• Ensure that the information is presented and organized in a way that makes sense for the community who is using the technology
• Keep it simple! We’ve been working with the design groups from TAT to create a streamlined design to get you the information you’re looking for FAST!

These microsites will continually evolve based on your feedback, what’s important to you, and how you approach developing apps. You’ll see lots of improvements to all of our websites as we continue to focus on getting you the information you want, the way you want it. So, don’t be shy. Let us know what you would like to see.

We are pleased to announce two new repositories of Open Source code for the BlackBerry® development platform. We have a repository of Java® sample code, which includes our BlackBerry JDE samples from the 7.0 SDK and a repository of samples previously released through our Knowledge Base. Now these popular code samples are available through the Apache License, version 2.0, which allows developers full access to use these code samples in their applications and extend the samples further.

JDE-Samples

If you aren’t familiar with the samples included in the BlackBerry tools, I’d recommend taking a look at our JDE-Samples repository if there is an API you are curious about. There are 100+ samples included which cover each major API. Our JDE-Samples repository will include these samples for each version of the SDK.

This repository uses Github’s support of branches (e.g. see Pro Github’s Chapter 3), to keep the samples for all the JDE releases in the same directory. For example, the in-device samples for JDE 4.6.1 are here. There are currently 8 branches, plus the master branch. There are also 8 tags, one for each of these branches.

Samples-for-Java

Our Samples-for-Java repository includes five sample applications and we will continue to add more in the future. The popular Advanced UI sample – with its many containers and components – is included. The Knowledge Base article for this sample shows some example screenshots so you can see what it can do. We’ve also included the Simple Location API, the Titlebar API, and sample apps for Analytics and a YouTube® client. Read on for more details on these samples.

Advanced UI: If you have ever wanted to take your UI designs further, this is the first place to look. There are several button extensions included, allowing you to use Bitmaps for buttons, use Embossed buttons, create hyperlinks and button lists. There are also toggle switches, sliders, ratings, and pill buttons that you can use in your applications. Advanced managers allow you to quickly create new layouts, like justified horizontal and vertical layouts, or 2-column screens. Finally, progress animations and bitmap gauge fields add polish to your UI.

Additional details and more screenshots like the one above are available in the Implement advanced buttons, fields, and managers article.

Simple Location API: Using GPS is not always the easiest task, and this code aims to change that for when you just want location information. It automatically handles carrier and device hardware support differences and battery usage concerns.

More details in the Knowledge Base article Simple Location API.

Titlebar API: Many different applications have a need for consistent system displays in their application. Basics like network coverage, the time, or the name of an application are desirable standards for an application to display at the top of the screen. In the BlackBerry Java SDK v.6.0, the Titlebar API was created for this purpose, but there are still plenty of OS 5.0 devices out there, and some of us need to support some of the 4.x code lines as well. This library attempts to port that 6.0 Titlebar API back as far as the 4.2.1 SDK. A preprocessor based wrapper allows you to code with one Titlebar class and build with any version of the SDK from 4.2.1 through 7.1.

The full Knowledge Base article including images is available: How To Implement a TitleBar with Signal Strength, Battery Level, Icon, Unread mail and Clock

Analytics Sample: This sample implements each of the BlackBerry Analytics SDK methods so you have a handy reference. If you sign up for the service, this sample is included in the SDK download, but with it being open sourced we can continue to expand on it.

YouTube Client: Originally published to both our blog and YouTube’s blog, this sample shows you how to work with the YouTube Data API using the BlackBerry Communication API from the 6.0 Java SDK. It’s a great starting point for either API or if you are doing a quick proof of concept with YouTube interaction. Further details in the Knowledge Base article: How to – Create a YouTube viewer with the BlackBerry 6 Communication API.

Check them out and see where the code takes you!

You’ve asked for it, now we’re delivering it! Over the past couple of months, the BlackBerry® developer community has taken a strong interest in some of the sample code that we’ve published, and with the demand coming in, we decided to build some fully functional Web Apps for you guys to take apart, dissect, and use however you’d like – including copying and pasting code into your own web applications. The first in a slew of new sample web apps will be released into the Developer Resource Center over the coming weeks!

The two samples that we’ve just posted are an RSS reader and Weather application. Both of these apps are 100% Web Apps built entirely using web technologies (HTML, JS, CSS). That’s right, not a single shred of Java® code in either of these!

The RSS application allows you to set any RSS feed you’d like and pull down the content on the fly. It lets you manage those RSS feeds in an easy-to-use UI, and it stores your feeds for you so they’ll always be ready when you are. This sample app demonstrates the use of tight integration with other apps (BlackBerry® Browser and Messaging applications), GPS, and integration into the BlackBerry Menu as well as how to go out over the network to retrieve and use content effectively.

The Weather application really demonstrates the blending of a fantastic UI with functionality. I have to say that this one really looks great, and is so easy to use! This sample app also shows off the use of a great UI, File I/O, GPS, and solid integration into the BlackBerry Menu.

Post a comment below and let us know what you think of these two samples, or the types of samples you’d like to see in the future.