Blackberry apps and more

Finally, writing a LBS program on BB pops up on my todo list. It is quite straightforward to setup development environment for BB. Officially, there are three different ways you could develop your apps with, browser mode, standard J2ME programs, MDS apps. I am not going to those what you can easily find out from BB developer zone. A few thoughts occur to me on mobile services, LBS content-sensitive apps and BB's offerings to achieve these. One way or another BB server sits as a service arbitrator. So programmability in this unit should be fairly important I would think, for real business solution. 

It is pretty easier to say hello to the rest of the world from either a native java program (with BB JDE or any types of UI supporting keyboard entry), or MDS program (with plugin for eclipse or Visual Studio). There were essentially the same thing other than MDS is a layer of middleware provided by RIM to facilitate web service development via on-device MDS runtime support and server end MDS service components. Although I have to say MDS alone only offers quite limited API support. Browser type BB apps present flexibility to extend traditional HTML based applications. The level of scripting support within the BB browser is actually quite impressive. Of course when you consider porting browser such as chrome, firefox or opera to BB, these would need careful scrutinising. It is worth mentioning that BB enterprise sever and client is claimed to support plugin modules implementing transcode interface to customerise information on both end. I have not yet played with this yet, probably worth another chapter. The other thing also has many merits is that many of the device capabilities such as GPS, bluetooth are accessible from the embedded scripts. RIM does suggest some best practices in developing each type of BB apps and the various ways of deployment.

Let's imagine that you are a service provider company. What you normally do is to provide your service via traditional dispatch channels to your customer, whether the implementation of these services are physical goods or not. Now you have setup a web service to dispatch that service, allowing it to be integrated with the rest of your facilities and third parties more easily and hopefully establish new, more efficient business models. Just because you realised, hopefully not too late, that 20% of your customers are normally using your service on the road, via some sort of mobile devices. Part of these devices are sold by you originally as the service deal; other part, however of your customers are using self-purchased devices, some of them supports similar platform as yours do, some of them not. I guess you see where we are going with this and how in BB world this could fit in the picture right now. MDS, native programs for mobile C/S extension, browser apps for B/S extension. Have we forgot anything?

Yes, we did. In a simple term, there is not really anything stopping a mobile device to be the source of computation and information, given there are means of powering it. The winner of android application competition has demonstrated to us how a mobile phone became a content-sensitive information retrieval device. Pointing your visual sensor - in this case video camera - fused with other information, you can pretty much explore the world, with a bit of help from service provider who holds the bigger picture (navigation map data, not position info). Current mobile social applications mostly still remain as a logic extension to PC world. In a situation, and era, where mobile information holder becomes the source of computation service and information suppliers to others, how would our application architecture is going to satisfy and what needs to be done to make this happen?

Push seems to be a nice start on this. Slightly change the viewpoint you will notice under push mode, BB device becomes the service provider, i.e. server. In fact, you could refer to the public push method (exposed by [DeviceMethod] similar to [WebMethod]) same way to standard web service.