“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

Recently, four BlackBerry® platform developers visited the offices of Nitobi, the company behind the PhoneGap open source, cross-platform application framework. The goal: implement support for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet in PhoneGap. As in any worthwhile endeavor, it was the experience and the road traveled that provided the value.

Recently, I had been concentrating on working with the tinyHippos team on their transition into the BlackBerry development platform, heading towards our grand vision for the next generation of BlackBerry® WebWorks™ tooling. One of the key pieces of that vision is to maintain support for other platforms such as PhoneGap. So of course we quickly whipped out our shiny BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, fired up Ripple and…well, PhoneGap doesn’t support the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. What to do?

We called up our good friends at Nitobi to find out what could be done, and the response was: “Well guys, check it out – PhoneGap is open source.” For those that don’t know, BlackBerry WebWorks has been an open source project since BlackBerry DEVCON 2010. We have been making progress on our open source strategy and processes, including being open in how we operate on the BlackBerry WebWorks codebase. But working on a BlackBerry-sponsored open source project is quite different from contributing to a third party open source. Further, PhoneGap is a framework whose purpose is to ease development of applications to run on multiple mobile platforms, not just the BlackBerry platform.

This was a perfect opportunity to push the bounds internally and show that the BlackBerry development platform is committed to open source, and especially to growing our involvement within the web community as a whole. A few slide decks and phone calls later, a couple of emails up the executive chain, and we had approval to head to Vancouver, sit with the Nitobi guys, and build support for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet into PhoneGap. It was an exciting and liberating experience; internal stakeholders were very supportive and only wanted to ensure we had done our due diligence.

A week later, with a too-expensive hotel breakfast in our bellies, the four of us were ensconced in a Nitobi conference room and working on an open fork of the PhoneGap codebase in GitHub. While not yet a finished product, we made great progress, and are now trying to finish this work off back in the real world of project deliverables. Have no fear – we WILL get it done, and stay involved even afterwards. Check out the progress in GitHub.

I have been with Research In Motion® (RIM®) for nine years and cannot recall any endeavor of this nature occurring in the past. Those three days at Nitobi provided an immeasurably valuable experience for the four of us, as well as for the BlackBerry platform. I can only hope this is a precursor to bigger and better things for BlackBerry development in the open source and web community. Our perspective on the path forward is forever changed.

Thanks to the Nitobi guys for their generous hospitality and the support given to understand the PhoneGap architecture, and answers to all the little questions along the way. Also, many thanks for the insight into your own perspectives on the mobile space and how web technology can and will play a key role. (The free beer was nice too.)

Web Standards and Embracing the Web

As we’ve been pushing forward with BlackBerry® WebWorks™ and embracing the web on the BlackBerry® platform, we’ve made some important moves. First, we brought WebKit to the BlackBerry platform, which now powers our browser on both the BlackBerry® Tablet OS and the BlackBerry smartphone OS with fantastic web standards support and wicked HTML5 capabilities.

We’ve also been iterating quickly on the BlackBerry WebWorks platform both for smartphones and tablet, bringing new functionality to web developers. Last year we made BlackBerry WebWorks an open source project on GitHub™ and, while we continue to pick up steam on GitHub, we have been bringing more of our daily development out into the open. The collaborative and open approach that we’ve been taking with our API documentation on GitHub is an indicator of how we’ll be operating moving forward with the project’s source code.

Understanding what Web Developers want

With each of these steps, we’ve been listening to our partners and the web development community to understand their needs from a technology and tooling standpoint. We kept hearing from the community that if the development of BlackBerry WebWorks applications could be as simple as developing a website with a traditional desktop browser it would make things MUCH easier than launching simulators and compiling code. It would also be SUPER COOL and AWESOME!

So, where we are going?

This is where tinyHippos and the Ripple Emulator becomes an important piece of the puzzle. Being able to point to a website (local or remote) that’s running your BlackBerry WebWorks application and emulate the entire BlackBerry WebWorks environment without having to compile your code or launch a simulator provides a similar experience to desktop browser development. This also means that you can use any editing tool that you like for your web content, and pick any web server to serve up your BlackBerry WebWorks application for testing. Then making changes is as simple as editing your source code and pressing refresh in the Ripple Emulator.

We also believe that one of the major advantages of HTML5 and web development is the promise of portable code and cross platform compatibility. This is why multiple platform support is currently available in the Ripple Emulator.

While the current implementation of the Ripple Emulator is excellent, we feel that we can take this capability and evolve it even further. Currently the emulator is implemented as a Google® Chrome™ plug-in, which has its benefits, but also brings with it common browser limitations that don’t allow for full BlackBerry WebWorks emulation.

Below you can find the functionality you will be able to expect from the Ripple Emulator as it evolves:

• Downloadable light weight emulator running on your desktop like a standard browser with integration into any tool that can have a browser registered (i.e. Eclipse™ & Visual Studio™)/li>
• Fidelity rendering and JavaScript® compatibility with the actual BlackBerry WebKit browser/li>
• Embedded Web Inspectorsupport for debugging/li>
• Ability to build and sign your app
• Ability to load your built application on a device simulator or actual device for final testing

Out with the Old and In with the New

In the spirit of openness, we want to let the community know that with our concentration on the new Ripple emulation environment we will be retiring the BlackBerry WebWorks plug-ins for Visual Studio and Eclipse.

These plug-ins will continue to be available for download in BlackBerry® Developer Zone until October 19th, 2011. There will be no new releases of the plug-ins, and they will only remain compatible with version 2.0 (and earlier) of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for BlackBerry smartphones. Further, we will end support for these plug-ins on December 31, 2011.

Migration path from using the WebWorks Plug-Ins

To ease the transition from the existing Visual Studio and Eclipse plug-ins, we have created a developer’s guide for migration. This article outlines alternative tools and also provides documentation and scripts to continue to use Eclipse and Visual Studio without the plug-ins.
The scripts provided aren’t just useful for those who continue to use Eclipse and Visual Studio for BlackBerry WebWorks development, but are also valuable for anyone building BlackBerry WebWorks applications using any IDE or authoring environment.

In Summary

We have lots of cool stuff that you can start using today, as well as many new enhancements on the way… hey, I just made a rhyme. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments!

We’re happy to announce that shortly after joining Research In Motion® (RIM®), the tinyHippos crew have an update available for the Ripple emulator BETA program, which now includes support for most of the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ APIs. It also provides skins for the BlackBerry® Bold™ series of smartphones, the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone and the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.

This BETA update will allow you to place your BlackBerry WebWorks app on a local web server, point the Ripple emulator at your website and test your BlackBerry WebWorks application without having to compile or load it onto a simulator during your development process. Of course, we recommend performing your final testing on a simulator – or even better, a live device – to ensure your application works the way you intend before making it available to your users.

This update is just one step forward towards how the Ripple emulator will evolve over the course of this year. Stay tuned for more updates on the direction of the Ripple tooling along with further steps towards bringing the smartphone and BlackBerry Tablet OS BlackBerry WebWorks SDKs together.

• Get Started with the Ripple BETA

We’re also excited to announce further steps towards a converged BlackBerry WebWorks platform between BlackBerry smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablet OS. We have now released an updated version of the BlackBerry WebWorks API Reference that brings both the smartphone and tablet OS APIs together in one consolidated reference guide.

This reference guide also includes documentation for all the HTML5 and web application APIs that are available within BlackBerry WebWorks applications. New documentation features have been added including filters based on OS version, table of contents and object listing views, updated look and feel, and tabling tools showing which APIs are supported on which platform. This new API documentation is also available for community collaboration on github.com/blackberry along with the project’s roadmap.

• View the latest API documentation

Today we are pleased to announce that tinyHippos has joined Research In Motion (RIM). We’re excited that the tinyHippos team is joining the BlackBerry Developer team and bringing their expertise in cross-platform emulation environments to the BlackBerry platform.

tinyHippos are the makers of a mobile environment emulator called Ripple and have extensive experience in web and mobile widget/web development. If you are not already familiar with them you can find out more about tinyHippos at
http://tinyhippos.com/
.

We have been integrating support for web technologies like HTML5 and BlackBerry WebWorks into our developer platform, and working to continually deliver enhanced tools and frameworks to our developer community. We look forward to working with the team at tinyHippos to further provide a simplified and streamlined experience to our developers.

- Tyler Lessard, VP Global Alliances & Developer Relation at RIM