Frustrations with Blackberry
As I’ve referenced a couple times, I’m doing some side work on the Blackberry right now. In all honesty, while it’s been a good learning process, it has been close to a constant source of frustration.
The frustrations I’ve experienced so far boil down to a couple things.
- I’m not a fan of Eclipse. I can’t put my finger on it, but I just don’t like the IDE. Maybe it’s because I’m used to Visual Studio, having used it for 10 years (even in the days of Visual C++.) However, even the VB6 IDE doesn’t annoy me as much as Eclipse has.
- Examples are either missing or hard to find.
- Feels like a high barrier to application development.
Before I continue, I should say, none of these three are keeping me from developing for the Blackberry, I’m just not being as efficient as I’d like.
I think #2 is the biggest issue. I’m getting more familiar with Eclipse. I still feel like I’m clumsily getting through the IDE, but less so. However, the lack of examples often causes things to take a long time. For example, I’m investigating how to use the TLS connection that is part of BB 5’s API.
My first thought is “Let’s see what the documentation has to say.” So I pull up the BB docs for API5 and start looking around. I find the TLS connection class, and can read about each function and parameter that is required, but I have yet to find a single example in their documentation. The funny thing, to me, is that MS often gets blasted for how bad MSDN looks, or their documentation, but at least they’ll put an example in on how to do something.
Like I said, none of this is keeping me from developing, but I think if there were just examples laying out how to do different aspects it would go a long way in getting apps done with less frustration.