I've read on some development blogs that it is nearly to impossible to build BlackBerry application properly on operating systems other than Windows. Any possible workarounds on veryfication, rapc usage etc may result in serious and hidden bugs. Please, share your knowlenge of the subject.
+3
A:
There is a nice blog about BB development under Linux:
www.slashdev.ca:
BlackBerry Development Using Linux
BlackBerry Simulator in Linux – Sort of
Simulator in Linux – Slightly More Reliable
MDS Simulator… in Linux
Using sigtool in Linux
And build it all: BlackBerry Development with Ant & Eclipse
Max Gontar
2009-09-29 13:42:55
I've been there. Check out here http://codeforfun.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/how-to-use-rapc-from-rim-dirty-details/. The most significant outcome from the article is that it is not correct to use Sun's WTK prevery tool since it is not the same as that one of RIM. You just cannot replace properly RIM implemetation, which leads to serious hidden bugs resulting in screens of death etc.
nixau
2009-09-29 14:17:43
err... BB Ant Tools use rapc for preverify, see http://bb-ant-tools.sourceforge.net/docs
Max Gontar
2009-09-29 14:23:43
They only provide special attribute to rapc target - exepath. Following the documentation: "Explicitly define the directory containing the preverify command used by the rapc compiler. When not defined, the systems default PATH is used."So, it assumes that preverify tool is somewhere on the disk and provides you with means for locating it so that rapc target could invoke preverify.But the issue remains - there's no proper replacement for RIM preverify tool on Linux.
nixau
2009-10-05 13:26:30
Another extract from documentation:"Blackberry Ant Tools use the executable jar files to run the rapc compiler and signature tool. There is nothing windows specific about these ant tasks. If you have a copy of the JDE and the J2ME preverify command somewhere in the path, the rapc compiler works fine on other operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, etc)."
nixau
2009-10-05 13:29:01
well, if locating is an issue, you can try to copy rapc, sigtool and anything else in project folder and use a relative path in bb ant task (I saw something like that once)
Max Gontar
2009-10-05 13:47:54