General information when developing for BlackBerry 10

Overview

This tutorial presents general development information for the BlackBerry 10 environment in the following topics:

• Project structure
• Accessing native capabilities by using Apache Cordova
• Optimizing applications
• Publishing

Project structure

A BlackBerry application that is developed with IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation comprizes the following components:

• A set of JavaScript libraries that provide access to various device features and capabilities
• Web application code that is provided by the developer, that is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and that runs in one or more instances of the browser
• All the application components, including the web code that the developer provides, packaged into a single BlackBerry project

IBM MobileFirst Platform supports BlackBerry devices that run BlackBerry OS version 6, 7.x, and 10.x.
If you use a source control management system (such as Rational Team Concert™, Git, Subversion, and so on), see the topic about integrating with source control system, in the user documentation.

Accessing native capabilities by using Apache Cordova

You can use the Apache Cordova framework to access the native elements of the device, such as contacts, geolocation services, media services, and accelerometer.
For more information about Apache Cordova development, see the Apache Cordova overview tutorial.

Optimizing applications

When developing a mobile application, you can use minification and concatenation to reduce the size and number of files that are used within the application. This feature is available for the following environments: Android, iOS, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, BlackBerry 10, Mobile Web and Desktop Browser.

For more information about minification and concatenation, see the topic about optimizing MobileFirst applications, in the user documentation.

Publishing

BlackBerry applications are published through BlackBerry App World.

For more information about this process, see the documentation about building and signing a completed app at https://developer.blackberry.com/html5/documentation/v2_1/build_and_sign_your_app.html#kba1371063698995.