The BlackBerry 10 app ecosystem is thriving today because of the awesome work of you, our developer community. On Wednesday, May 15th, we celebrated the winners of the 2013 BlackBerry Developer Community Awards at the BlackBerry Live Tweet Up. Thank you again for the over 200 nominations and thousands of votes on HashAwards and on Twitter. Here are your 2013 winners!

Must Follow BlackBerry Developer on Twitter - Joel Ortiz

Must Follow BlackBerry Developer Evangelist - Luca Filigheddu

Most Helpful Developer Community Forum Member - Peter Strange

Most Helpful Developer Relations Team Member on Twitter - Brian Zubert

Best Built for BlackBerry App – CB10

Best Open Source Project for BlackBerry – bbui.js

Best Scoreloop Integrated Game - Jetpack Joyride

Thank you again to everyone who nominated and voted – see you in Hong Kong for BlackBerry Jam Asia!

The socialinvocation sample shows you how to invoke Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with all the currently supported invocation parameters. You can set your Facebook status, compose a Tweet, upload a picture, invoke a Facebook page or Twitter profile, and much more!

Besides being an avenue for seeing cute pictures of your high school friends’ kids, social media plays an important role in marketing your apps. Use the invocation framework features to direct users to your company’s Facebook page, display your Twitter feed, or allow users to post screenshots of your app! Effectively employing social media is a great way to attract new users, so be sure to take advantage of the invocation framework’s support of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Luckily for them, sharing content from your BlackBerry WebWorks app just got super easy.

While browsing through our ever-growing catalogue of Sample Apps on GitHub, I realized we were missing some crucial Invocation samples for Facebook and Twitter! “Blasphemy,” you say?! I agree, so here is some quick info about how you can share data to Facebook and Twitter from your app.

With only a few lines of JavaScript, you can invoke these two lovely cards.

…and here’s the code:

function invokeTwitter() {
    blackberry.invoke.invoke({
        target: "Twitter",
        action: "bb.action.SHARE",
        type: "text/plain",
        data: "In @chadtatro we trust."
    }, onSuccess, onError);
}
function invokeFacebook() {
    blackberry.invoke.invoke({
        target: "Facebook",
        action: "bb.action.SHARE",
        type: "text/plain",
        data: "I’m eating tacos with Alex."
    }, onSuccess, onError);
}

All memes and jokes aside, the invocation framework is incredibly powerful. Integrating it in to your application is another simple way for you to provide that genuine BlackBerry 10 “look and feel” to your users.

For the full sample app, check out our GitHub repository.

If you have any question, concerns, or just want to show your love, you can find me on Twitter at @chadtatro. (
http://twitter.com/chadtatro
)

So how do you actually go about integrating features from these services into your application?  First the needs to allow your application access to their profile, and this bring us to Open Authorization – better known as OAuth.

OAuth you say?!

OAuth is an open standard for authorization used by tons of popular services, foursquare, Twitter, and Tumblr, to name a few.  It allows applications to connect their users to these services without having to handle their username and password.

There are a couple versions of OAuth which we have created sample apps for.

OAuth 1

Let’s be honest, OAuth 1 can be darn right nasty to work with out-of-the-box.  OAuth 1 and I are not really good friends, we’ve had many fights over the past year, and often I’ve been on the losing side.  In a nutshell, the way OAuth 1 works is by having an application perform a series of requests to a service, exchanging “tokens”, and ultimately granting the application access to the service on behalf of the user.  It requires several things to go just right, and if something doesn’t, access is denied.

Luckily there is a really awesome open-source JavaScript library written by Rob Griffiths (@bytespider) called jsOAuth. JsOAuth takes the pain and extensive process of OAuth 1 away, and allows you to focus on connecting your app with a service such as Twitter rather than spend a ton of time working with the OAuth 1 protocol.

OAuth 2

While OAuth 1 is my adversary; OAuth 2 is my best friend.  This is the next evolution of the OAuth protocol and is used by services like foursquare, and Facebook.  OAuth 2 is much friendlier for developers to integrate into their apps, and provides much easier, and straight forward authorization “flows” to work with.  Though the standard is still evolving, it’s solid, and in contrast to OAuth 1, is amazingly easy to work with.

The Sample Apps

Getting started with OAuth can be pretty intimidating to say the least.  As a former 3^rd party developer, I’ve been there.  I’ve screamed at my console log, cried like a baby, and even begged the OAuth gods for it to “just work”.  Since joining the BlackBerry® Developer Relations team here at RIM®, I vowed to help make this process easier for fellow developers and I’m glad to finally say that we’ve released two sample apps on GitHub today to help guide you on your OAuth journey.

The first sample app shows how to integrate Twitter into your application by using the OAuth 1 protocol.  You’ll learn how to quickly and painlessly authenticate with Twitter, and post a Tweet to a user’s timeline by taking advantage of the jsOAuth library.

The second sample shows integration with foursquare, and uses OAuth 2.  It’ll show you how your application can authenticate a user with the service, search for near-by venues, and then check-in to a venue.

The third sample shows how to integrate Facebook and OAuth 2 into your application.  You’ll learn how to authenticate a user with Facebook, and interact with their feed by posting, and reading content.

Each of these samples are completely Open Source, and available on GitHub.  If you find them useful, have any feedback, or need an extra helping hand along your way find me on the BlackBerry Developer Support Forums or Twitter @chadtatro.

Download the sample app

So this is it folks — no more hair-pulling to figure out how to talk to social networks directly. There are already apps for them, so let’s learn how to leverage those apps from ours instead of reinventing it.

The first step is to create the data or context we would like to share. This context is simply a JSON object that encapsulates our data. Here is an example:

JSONObject context = new JSONObject();
try {
context.put(SendCommandContextKeys.TEXT, "Your Text");
context.put(SendCommandContextKeys.SUBJECT, "Your Text");
// context.put(SendCommandContextKeys.PATH, "file:///.....");
} catch (JSONException e) {
System.out.println(e.toString());
}

I intentionally commented out the PATH type data because we cannot use PATH data in a context that also has TEXT or SUBJECT types. But I still wanted to highlight that we can also share a file path (e.g. a photo).

Once we have our data context nicely wrapped up in a JSONObject, we need to create SendCommand objects that point to specific apps with a specific context. So how do we get these SendCommands? Easy peasy — we simply query the Send Command Framework with our context data. Here’s how:

SendCommand[] commandsAll =
SendCommandRepository.getInstance().get(SendCommand.TYPE_TEXT, context, true);

Notice that the 3rd parameter above is a Boolean. If true, the query returns all commands regardless if their associated applications can be opened; if false, it returns only commands whose associated applications can be opened. Ideally we would set it to false; however, in this post we will see how we can get them all and filter them in our own application logic.

Each SendCommand object has an ID that uniquely identifies the target app and the context. Note that the IDs are not documented as there could be so many of them, but it is fairly easy to figure them out by experimentation. Since our target is the Facebook app and the Twitter app, let me save you the work by telling you what their IDs are.

Now let’s filter:

for (int i = 0; i < commandsAll.length; i++) {
if (commandsAll[i].getId().equals("Twitter_text")) {
commands[0] = commandsAll[i];
}
if (commandsAll[i].getId().equals("Facebook_text")) {
commands[1] = commandsAll[i];
}
}

…and we are done. We have our SendCommand objects and we are free to call their run() method anywhere in our app. Be it a Button click or a Menu selection, knock yourself out!

Jerome Carty’s momentum has been building since he first decided to develop apps three years ago. A long-time Java® programmer, Jerome founded Kisai Labs and has used his knowledge to develop highly successful applications for BlackBerry® smartphones and the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet – including Blaq, a popular Twitter client for the tablet. As a part-time developer, Jerome needs powerful development tools that are simple and efficient to work with. Working closely with the Research In Motion® (RIM®) development team and an engaged user base, Jerome has designed creative, useful applications that have generated buzz within the BlackBerry community.

Jerome talked to us about the importance of his engagement with RIM and his user base, working with BlackBerry® WebWorks™, newly released APIs, and developing a successful BlackBerry PlayBook tablet application in only one month.

Dev Blog: Why has your partnership with the RIM development team been so important?

Jerome: For me personally, the ability to talk to actual people about the smallest details rather than hearing a canned response is an asset. I’ve dabbled with other platforms but keep returning to work with RIM, and a huge reason for that is the people who are willing to help. The development team has helped my applications gain exposure, and outreach by RIM on social media like Twitter® and within forums has been really useful. I can also say that the users themselves are very engaged with the applications and help promote it to others. A big part of Blaq’s success was the engagement of BlackBerry PlayBook tablet users. They built a ton of hype and word of mouth buzz before it even launched, which was crucial to its success.

Dev Blog: Why do you like working with the new BlackBerry Operating Systems?

Jerome: APIs are really important for me and any time you have a code that goes from up to 100 lines to just five, it makes any developer’s life simpler. That’s the reality of developing for BlackBerry now. For example, the new network and communication APIs have made it much easier to consume web services such as Twitter. Also, in the past you had to code a lot of images or processes like a JavaScript® Object Notation (JSON) by hand, but with these APIs my workload has dropped dramatically and my development time has been reduced. I’m also experimenting more with BlackBerry WebWorks. Learning that has been a relatively easy process.

Between the APIs and the other development software, I think that RIM is providing enough tools for any developer from any background to jump in and start. All you need is an idea and the means to do it.

Dev Blog: How were you able to develop Blaq – your successful BlackBerry PlayBook tablet application – in just one month?

Jerome: For this one, I used Adobe® Flash Builder software, which is an Eclipse-based development tool. It was my first full experience using Adobe® AIR® and ActionScript®. I found working with Adobe AIR to be relatively simple because of my past involvement with Java and all the great resources that were readily available online. I did an application when the Adobe AIR SDK first came out and it only took me four hours to come up with a simple browser. It’s easy for anyone with a Java or JavaScript background because Adobe AIR sort of combines the two. As I mentioned, the variety and quality of APIs took out a lot of the guesswork for me. In less than 30 days we went from concept to actual launch and it was the highest grossing launch of a paid app for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Updating the application was also a smooth process.

Dev Blog: How have you integrated your applications with the native features and functions of BlackBerry smartphones and the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet?

Jerome: When it launched, Blaq was one of the only applications in BlackBerry App World™ storefront that had a real-time stream of Twitter, which was significant. When we launched the 1.5 version, we added native notifications, which is something that everybody wanted. The notifications turned out to be one of the best things that we included in the application. We use touch gestures, we can upload photos directly from the application and we have a native web-view inside the application. If you click on a link inside of the application you don’t have to exit the app and go into the browser. It feels like a full experience within the application. Incorporating these integrated characteristics really adds to the overall user experience.

Thanks for your time, Jerome!

As we all get in taxis, cars, trains, and planes (maybe boats too?) to travel to BlackBerry® DEVCON 2010, have you planned ahead and checked out all the special programs this year?!

Yes, not only do we have a MASSIVE catalog of over 100 sessions, but we’ve also lined up a panacea of special programs to suit the diverse passions and interests of the community.

These are my personal favorites!

• On Monday morning, various @BlackBerryDev team members – including yours truly – will be leading DEVCON tours to help new attendees get familiar with all the key activities and locations throughout the week – even an alumnus may discover something new! Find the tours by heading to the registration desk.
• Also on Monday morning, DEVCON Alumni will have access to an exclusive One-On-One event with Research In Motion® (RIM) experts in an informal setting. This event is taking place in Yerba Buena Ballroom 7 between 9:00-11:30am. Check out all the cool alumni benefits including VIP lounge, discounts, and an Alumni exclusive breakfast!
• Monday night is going to be huge too! After the welcome reception (another can’t-miss event, by the way), we will be holding a special Community Connection event all about celebrating the BlackBerry Developer Community. Join us to hear about highlights from the BlackBerry Partners Fund “Super Apps” Developer Challenge, learn about our new BlackBerry Developer Groups popping up all over the world, and cheer as we recognize community members for outstanding contributions. Get all the details here!
• The BlackBerry DEVCON foursquare Challenge starts with the first check-in at the DEVCON keynote Monday at 12:30pm.
• Tuesday night. DEVCON party! Enough said.
• Wednesday night, we have both an International Reception for our guests from outside the US and Canada, and the DEVCON Mobile Scavenger Hunt powered by AT&T. Head out into the city of San Francisco for an evening of adventure and fun! Passes will be handed out at the AT&T booth, so make sure you swing by!
• Are you a student or faculty? Make sure you check out the special Academic Program!
• …and don’t forget about Developer Day on Thursday! Find all the details here, and in my previous blog post.

Which of these DEVCON special programs will you be attending?

If you’re not already following us on Twitter® – @BlackBerryDev – I wanted to let you know what you’re missing out on!

The @BlackBerryDev team includes a variety of people from the Developer Relations team at Research In Motion® (RIM). Through @BlackBerryDev, we strive to support developer conversations in the community – answering developer questions and providing handy development tips along the way. Something new you will soon see is us highlighting some remarkable things that BlackBerry® developers are doing with the platform, as well as tools that we think you might be interested in. We’ll also be providing lots of coverage of BlackBerry DEVCON 2010 next week, so you won’t want to miss out!

If you haven’t already, check out our Twitter account and be sure to follow us! You can also follow our extended family accounts @BlackBerry for all BlackBerry news and @BlackBerryHelp for device questions.

The 2009 BlackBerry® Developer Conference is coming to the San Francisco Marriott Marquis on November 9th-12th and the official Conference guide application is now available to help attending developers plan, navigate and more!

Attending developers can use the Mobile Conference Guide application on their BlackBerry® smartphone to access their conference schedule, look up session details and sponsors, view maps of the conference area, and follow breaking news via the conference blog. The guide is designed to automatically update attendees when there are schedule changes, and it can synchronize with their personally created conference schedule via the My Scheduler tool.

Download the Mobile Conference Guide in BlackBerry App World

When we found out that our coworkers at the BlackBerry® Support Community Forums had their very own Twitter account, the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog team realized we had to get our own account to keep up! Social media fans can now follow @BlackBerryDev to stay up to date on all the latest news and developments with the BlackBerry Application Platform. Those attending the 2009 BlackBerry® Developer Conference should also note that @BlackBerryDev will be a great source of information during the show!

So send us a tweet and say hi. We’d love to hear from you!