Apr
11
Android development vs. Blackberry Development
April 11, 2009 | 6 Comments
I was contemplating quite a lot about the title for this post. Originally I wanted to give it the title of “Why developing for Blackberry sucks” but then I thought it might be too harsh and does not really reflect the content of the post which is about comparing the experience of developing for Android and experience of developing for Blackberry and settled for the current title. There were other titles revolving in my head, but all of them were just variations of the original “why developing for Blackberry sucks”
I have been developing for Android for some time and lately I have been working on developing for Blackberry and I must say development for Android wins hands down in all aspects. Many times, especially frustrated with Blackberry buggy IDE or other cumbersome experience I wanted to write this post, but I had to find the time for it.
So what is so bad about Blackberry development? It starts at the very basics – development environment. Google has developed a very nice plugin for Eclipse which works very well and even has the basics of support for visual editing of user iterface screens. RIM – the company behind Blackberry for a long time had their own development environment – JDE. Written using basic SWING components, there’s no need to mention how bare boned and outdated it looked. They have recently introduced Eclipse plugin as well, but it is pretty buggy and half baked. It is hundreds times better than the first version of the plugin, but it is still from being stable and feature rich.
Then we have the emulators – gosh, why do I have to restart the emulator everytime I want to test a new build? It can take up to a few minutes to restart the emulators for the more advanced models. To feel the pain, just imagine the nightmare of programming the UI for Blackberry in that setup. And no, there is no visual helper that can show the layout quickly, not to mention visual builder.
The compiler, or more exactly the packager – “rapc” has many times weird problems and behaves like a whiny child with lots of attitude problems. Same goes for the MDS server emulator.
Compared to Android, this can be nightmare. Yes I’ve had some issues and observed buggy behavior with aapt while developing for Android, but it was quite easy to resolve. For the UI part of the development, Android beats Blackberry as well. Constructing layout using XML is much easier than writing actual Java code. (Apple had actually went one step furthergiving the developers visual tools.)
Localization is much easier in Android as well. Besides conceptually being easy, the support of the Eclipse plugin for localization is half baked and buggy and what’s most important, it is not that easy to find documentation on how to implement localization for Blackberry in Eclipse.
The last but not the least (and in fact probably most important) is the vibrant, enthusiastic and active community of the Android platform. It is so much easier to find answers to any problems you have while developing for Android. I was a little considered about Android being all open source in a sense that there is no central authority with central responsibility for certain things, and Blackberry has all this and it turns out that what many enthusiasts can do, easily outweighs any size company organized or not.
Related posts:
- BlackBerry development with Eclipse plugin – fixing corrupted *.jdp file
- Palm inc. allows early access to it’s Mojo framework for developers
- Problems running BlackBerry Simulator (fledge) on Windows 7 64 bit
- Showing a dialog (or screen) from a background thread on BlackBerry
Comments
6 Comments so far
[...] around the platform, which is what eventually created the success of the platform as a whole. RIM – fails short both on ease of the development and support for multiple platforms, so no surprise there whatsoever. It is on the right track, but it keeps moving very slow and still [...]
[...] of experience with Android emulator and I had a LOT of experience with BlackBerry emulator while developing for BlackBerry and Android. And I must tell you – not one of those impressed me as much as Palm’s emulator. And [...]
I feel your pain.. developing a gui that doesn’t look like complete garbage and consists of anything more complicated than a list of checkboxes takes an enormous amount of time and exposes so many quirks in the way fields are rendered it is beyond painful…
I agree with the author of this article. I’ve been playing around with BlackBerry development for almost a week now, and am considering abandoning it in favor of Android development. Here are just few reasons:
1) Almost no support for BB JDE plugin for Eclipse 3.5
2) Very difficult to get JDE working in a Linux environment
3) Don’t want to run a Windows VM solely for BB development. I’d much rather stay in my native Linux OS
… And all of this from a guy who is merely a beginner in BB development. I can’t imagine the headaches one would have to transcend to become an expert in BB development.
In my opinion, the Android is in position to directly compete with the iPhone. With the nexus one coming out early 2010. And their updated app store rumors, Google is doing things right.
@Igor – 3.5 is supported already (although 1.1 plugin is in beta).
64bit OSes are NOT supported however. As simple thing as adding a JAR library to your project can not be done in Eclipse (I tried – spent couple days trying – no joy…)
@android developer
Yeah – Nexus one should be a great phone, but it will not be an iPhone killer… Android won’t be an iPhone killer at least not yet…
There is a good post I just posted today here:
http://blog.androidz.info/2010/01/who-will-rule-the-mobile-market-in-5-years/
check it out