Rockin' it with the BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse
by Eric Cho, March 25
Here it is folks, the Blackberry JDE
Eclipse plug-in has arrived. Mind you, it's in beta, but so far I
really haven't had many problems with it. *knock on wood*
Check it out here.
What do I think of it? It's great!
You get all the 'niceities' of Eclipse and from what I can tell,
all the key functionality that JDE provides. Easy to install, and easy
to import existing JDE workspaces.
Working with JDE for awhile, you get
used to the 'clunkiness'; having to manually build every time, navigating
through an awkward packaging structure, having only 1 file visible at a
time and so on. But all this is managed automatically and easier to use
on the Eclipse plug-in. I guess its like comparing a Honda to a Ferrari;
both will eventually get you to the same place, but one gets you there
faster (and in style). I guess the only discrepancy in the comparison is
that both are FREE.
The only item I had an issue with is
the Signature Tool. You'll notice that when you run your CSI files (that
were sent by Blackberry admin), it may have only created your reference
files in the JDE's bin directory. Just simply grab the sigtool.csk and
sigtool.db file from the JDE bin directory and throw them into the Eclipse
component directory (<EclipseDir>\plugins\net.rim.eide.componentpack4.3.0_4.3.0.8\components\bin\.)
and you're good to go.
I'm sure that once I work with it a
bit longer, I'll eventually get to the issues a beta tends to have, but
I'll be sure to let you know if I come across anything that's mind-blowing.
For those of you already working with
it, what are your thoughts and issues you've encountered?
For those of you who haven't used it
yet, there's a Flash video
provided by RIM on how to install and configure the plug-in as well as
a 'Getting
Started' guide on the download
page.
