At work I have been attempting to get our 800+ BlackBerry devices updated. This all began when we provided our service application to a site to use with their own technicians. The devices that we gave them were the BlackBerry Bold 9930. Luckily for me, I also got one of these devices and handed in an old 8800 BlackBerry. The Bold’s came with OS 7.0, but I updated mine to 7.1 in order to take advantage of the Hot Spot feature. Also, in OS 6 and 7, there is a feature for using Near Field Communication NFC tags. While most of the focus on NFC is payment, I see that my company can use the data storage and macros features for use with the service application.
But, the main reason for the upgrade to OS 6 or better, is the availability of SQLite on the phone. Previously, storing data on the BlackBerry devices was a little limited. It was similar to creating a very long text file and finding a particular item at a certain spot in order to get the data. In a word, it was clunky. Even though SQLite isn’t a full featured database, it is enough of a database to make inserting, updating and deleting data on the device much easier. So, I decided to delve in an update the old client application to version 6, which first required changing to Eclipse, more specifically, BlackBerry plugin for Eclipse. And changing to a new IDE and when you do that, you have re-setup your BlackBerry connections on the simulator to get things to work correctly.
With BlackBerry, you have a MDS that routes the pushes from a server to the appropriate device. On a simulator, you modify a rimpublic.properties file to make sure the data is okay to go to the device. An issue I had was that the push was failing. Because the push server had been already setup and I was just trying to get the simulator to receive the pushes, I didn’t have a direct look at the push command. One of the things you have to provide is the port of the application. When you setup up the device side listener to the wrong port, then your pushes never get to the application. D’oh! After I fixed that simple error, the data being pushed wasn’t displaying the entire data stream. The demo had the output example happen before the stream was repackaged back into a database, so only a portion was being shown. Oops. After I figured out to step to the parsing function after the push stream was finished. This was also an issue with opening and closing the database. The demo showed that every time you do a transaction to the database, you should open it and then close it. Well, that worked great in the simulator, but not so on the device. In the end, I found out that the best thing to do was open the database when the application was open and then not close it until I wanted to close the application for good.
The upgrade has been a slow start, but now it is moving along. Hopefully I can get the application converted and work on the new features that I want the application to do without too much more trouble.
Dean has been playing around with programming ever since his family got an IBM PC back in the early 80's. Things have changed since BASICA and Dean has dabbled in HTML, JavaScript, Action Script, Flex, Flash, PHP, C#, C++, J2ME and SQL. On this site Dean likes to share his adventures in coding. And since programming isn't enough of a time killer, Dean has also picked up the hobby of short film creation.
