Several people have asked me recently for links to different BlackBerry development-related resources. Well, I started building a repository of information about BlackBerry development-related topics - I'm going to launch the site on November 1st, stay tuned for additional information.

As I worked on the book, I found different articles on RIM's web site and elsewhere that helped me learn the topic better or reinforce some of the content. At the end of each chapter, I added an Additional Resources section that listed each of these links. One of my reviewers from RIM suggested that I post those links online so they will be easier to access by the book's readers. I setup a special section of the book's web site and posted all of the links last night. You can access the links at http://www.bbdevfundamentals.com/index.php/inside-the-book/mnuaddlresources. I'll be adding more links as I uncover them.

Also, RIM recenly removed all of the Developer Journal issues from their web site. The Developer Journal was a cool publication because the topics were covered thoroughly in long articles. They were full of pictures and source code. I really loved them and it was through them that I learned most of the nitty gritty details about how some of the technologies worked. I've been told that the Journal articles have been made available as Knowledge Base articles - but I haven't checked to see if they all made it. Even so, the kbase articles are usually very short, so there's no way the full content from the Journal articles made it over. I have copies of most of the issues and I'm toying with the idea of posting them to this site or to www.bbdevfundamentals.com. Let me know what you think.

Here's the cover for Volume 2, Issue 1 from 2005 - Looks like good stuff, huh?

Introduction

In Part 1 in this series, I showed how to build a simple Domino Web Service that performed a lookup against a contact database built from the standard public Domino Directory template (pubnames.ntf) and in Part 2 and Part 2.5 I demonstrated how to build the Java stub class that can be used to consume the web service. 

In this installment, I’ll demonstrate how to build a simple Java application that uses the generated code to access the web service. At this point, you’ll need:

1. A Domino server hosting the database provided in Part 1. The server must be running the HTTP process and the database ACL must be configured with the appropriate access.
2. The generated class files for the service. These files were generated in Part 2.
3. A functioning BlackBerry Java Development environment configured on your system that includes the appropriate Sun Java Development Kit (JDK) plus the appropriate BlackBerry Java development tools (either the JDE or the JDE Plug-in for Eclipse and the appropriate JDE Component package installed). Refer to the BlackBerry Developer’s web site www.blackberry.com/developers for information on how to download and configure these tools. The ability to consume web services using JSR 172 was added in BlackBerry Device Software 4.3, so be sure you are using the right tools (version 4.3 or higher).

I’m going to assume you already know how to build a BlackBerry Java application – there’s no time to dig into all of that before getting into the meat of this article. If you haven’t worked with the BlackBerry Java development tools then you should either buy my book (www.bbdevfundamentals.com) or spend some time on the BlackBerry Developer’s web site getting up to speed before continuing.

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
ContactLookup.zip		15 Kb
Domino Web Service Part 3.pdf		1229 Kb

I recently had a change of employment status and I thought I’d write about it here just in case anyone out there knew of someone who had a need for my skills either as a contract worker or full time employee.

I’ve been a professional software developer since…well, for a very long time. I started out writing software programs to automate Physics experiments for the University of Akron then branched out into consulting, working for several different firms until I got my job at Research In Motion. 

I became a Novell Certified Netware Engineer then Novell Certified Netware Instructor. When I began my Lotus Notes career – I quickly became a Lotus Certified Notes Instructor (one of the first batch certified outside of Lotus). Because of this, I spent a great many years as a full time instructor and finely tuned my presentation skills.

My first big accomplishment was an IBM Beacon Award for Biggest Business Impact in 1997 for an application I helped design for Key Bank. We designed and built a system for managing the merchant setup process for credit card processing. The system we built decreased the merchant setup process from 12 to 5 days and involved a very complicated series of integrations with mainframe-based systems all over the US. It was an expensive application to build, but generated a significant return on investment for the bank.

I’ve created several commercial software products using Borland (now Embarcadero) Delphi as well as Lotus Notes/Domino.  The most successful Domino one is a product called Automated Deployment Toolkit (ADT) for Lotus Notes. It was an IBM Beacon Award winner in 2002 in the Best Tool/Utility category. It’s a product that is still sold today and has been a very successful product for Wolcott Group. For ADT, I did all of the initial product development – building it into a full, commercial product before bringing on additional developers to help maintain and support the product. I was ultimately responsible for development, sales, support, documentation and managing our relationships with partners including IBM (ADT’s biggest reseller).

I created ConfigSave for Lotus Notes – a tool that allowed you to save and restore Notes configurations and easily switch between configurations. In 2002 it won the Lotus Advisor Magazine award for Cool New Tool. I also created ClientSync – a more reliable competitor for the roaming capabilities IBM added to Notes in an earlier version.

My favorite commercial application I created is a product called Official’s Record Keeper (ORK) – an application for managing all of the data a sports official needs to track. There’s a free trial version available for download or it can be purchased here. If you know of any sports officials, please send them that link.

As an employee at RIM, I worked with AT&T to support their customers with building BlackBerry applications. I regularly educated customers on the capabilities of the platform and made sure they had everything they needed to build these apps. I became then a subject matter expert on the capabilities of the platform and the tools available to build the apps.  It's these skills that prepared me for writing the book. My enterprise application experience gave me just the right skills to understand exactly what they were going through. I applied the same customer service attitude I used with my software products to make sure every customer was taken care of.

Through all of this, I became a very detail oriented and reliable project and product manager, writer and presenter. As I mentioned, I’m looking for contract work immediately – either project management, Domino, Delphi or BlackBerry development or delivering training classes.  I’d be most interested in doing BlackBerry development work (a bonus but not a requirement would be for it to be on Domino).  For the long term, I’m looking for a position leveraging any of my skills. I’m ultimately interested in becoming Director of Mobile Development for the right company but will do any type of work as long as it exercises my brain, leverages existing skills and/or helps me gain new skills.

If you know of anything or hear of anything, please let me know – you can use the ‘Contact Me’ link in the navigation area on the left to contact me.  Thanks for listening (reading).

I had a conversation the other day with my good friend Rocky Oliver. He's in the same boat as I am and is getting back online. Check out his site when you get a chance.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions and comments about the article series (which is great, keep them coming). I got some questions from Brendan yesterday and it was clear that I really didn’t cover a very important part of the stub generation process. It’s not that I missed it; it’s just that I was primarily trying to demonstrate something and didn’t cover all of the background information you would need to use this process with your web services. 

In the example I’ve provided with this article series (Part 1 and Part 2), I’ve deliberately selected a base web service that’s simple enough to be easily consumed using the capabilities provided by JSR 172. Since the specification (yep, it’s not a ‘standard’ as was pointed out last week) was designed for mobile devices, its designers deliberately selected a limited number of data types it would support thinking that it would reduce the potential load on devices and cover a majority of implementations.

When I created the service, I created it with the knowledge that the Sun tools for creating the stub program only supported certain data types and I made sure I used them. The problem arises for those of you who want to build BlackBerry applications that consume web services that were not built with mobile users in mind. Let’s dig into the detail...