Notes from BlackBerry DevCon 2011

Last week a bunch of us from Marmalade attended the BlackBerry DevCon in San Francisco. It was a great event for us, with Alex (President) on stage twice during the CEO’s keynote, talking about how Marmalade is helping to bring great apps and games to RIM’s new devices, and showing off some great examples such as “Cut the Rope” and “Harold and the Purple Crayon”.

RIM announced the new name for their new OS platform: “BBX” (a combo of “BlackBerry” and “QNX”, the latter being the underlying RTOS for the platform), together with a clarification of their developer strategy for apps across all new RIM devices. This strategy is multi-threaded, with developers being offered a wide range of options. Of these, there are two main pillars, and several secondary pillars.

The two main pillars are:

BBX Native SDK (NDK)

RIM were pushing this hard. Obviously being an NDK, it’s the best way of getting performance out of your apps, and of getting access to all of RIM’s differentiating APIs. Of course, Marmalade uses the NDK to provide our support for BBX, and currently we’re the only cross-platform SDK providing native apps and games to BBX.

BlackBerry WebWorks (HTML5/CSS/JavaScript)

WebWorks is similar to PhoneGap: your apps runs in a web view control, using the HTML/CSS renderer, and custom JavaScript APIs are provided for accessing device-specific functionality. In fact, PhoneGap on BBX is a very thin layer on top of WebWorks.

The secondary pillars are:

BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps

Many people have been intrigued by this. Yes, RIM have put a large chunk of the Android application runtime into their platform. This means certain kinds of Android apps should be able to run on BBX devices. The runtime only supports a subset of Android APIs (level 10) at launch, and no Google libraries are supported (so no Google Maps), and camera support is a bit patchy.

Adobe AIR

Adobe’s AIR solution supports BBX.

My impression from speaking to developers at the event was that they were generally impressed by RIM’s commitment to the new platform, and the work that had been put into the two main pillars, especially the BBX Native SDK. There was some discontent that the “old” Java runtime was being discontinued, with some died-in-the-wool BlackBerry developers clearly holding a fair amount of Java code they want to be able to re-target. Some of these were considering porting their Java codebases to the Android SDK, and seeing if the BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps would support this. Others were delighted that BlackBerry devices would now support native apps, and on our showfloor booth we were seeing a lot of interest in Marmalade as a way of targeting the BBX native runtime, obviously due to the ability seamlessly to target iOS and Android at the same time.

RIM’s public commitment to games was also a hot topic, with Alec Saunders (new VP Developer Relations) stating that proving BBX as a killer games platform was absolutely key. PocketGamer editor Jon Jordan remarked that “in six years of writing about mobile games, I've only ever had one conversation with someone from RIM. It didn't really involve mobile gaming”, and was now pleasantly surprised to be engaging with their new Head of Games, Anders Jeppsson.

Marmalade has already helped to bring 20 games and apps to the BlackBerry App World store for BBX, including SimCity Deluxe, Game of Life, ToFu, Spacelings and BattleBallz Chaos, with many more including “Backbreaker Football” and “Cut the Rope” coming very soon.

You can read more about using Marmalade to deploy to BBX (currently the PlayBook device) in our online documentation.