[plevintampabay]

Its been 7 months since I've touched the BlackBerry. I'm back on that project, but I might get pulled off again in a week (hopefully only for a month).

I'm also on a new computer, so I had to set everything up again. I am so happy I wrote this article. I knew, when I did, that I would need it to get setup again.

But alas, RIM has removed web pages and made other changes.

1) Following the article, the first thing I discovered is that the latest JDK from Sun is JDK SE 1.6.0 update 12.

2) RIM's latest JDE is 4.7, which can be found at http_://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/javaappdev/javadevenv.jsp

3) RIM also has new versions of their Eclipse plugin, but I still can not get it to work. If you go to the web page for the JDE, on the left is a button to get the Eclipse plugin. On that page is a button to Download the plug, which gives you the plugin for JDE 4.5 (at least 7 months old), which we knew back then, didn't work. If you scroll down you will find downloads for several versions of the plugin. The first time I downloaded the version for 4.7, WinZip said the zip was corrupted. The second time I downloaded it, WinZip said that one of the jar files in it, had a bad CRC. So much for trying RIMs plugin for Eclipse.

4) There is a new version of bb-ant-tools (v 1.0.2). It is at the same url as before.

5) Finally I got the latest Eclipse - JEE 3.4.1

I still need to use the simulator for 8820 (that is the device I'm targeting, not the 9500 or 9530, whose simulators come with the 4.7 JDE). Luckily I still had the installer for it, which I can no longer find at RIM.

It was not easy to get the new JDWP to work with the 8820 simulator. What I finally got working is this -
a) install the 4.7 JDE
b) rename the JDE/simulator directory to simulator_9500
c) install the 8820 simulator to the directory JDE/simulator.
d) modify the simulator invocation command as per my original post above.

There were several other minor changes (names of menu items or buttons that have been changed) in Eclipse and the JDWP, but they are all minor and easy to resolve.

This is what I've re-learned so far. I'll post what ever else I discover, when I do.

Its very disappointing to see that RIM's tools are as difficult to deal with now, as they were 7 months ago. I guess they are trying to keep the population of developers to a minimum.