Blackberry MDS Studio - Eclipse-ified
by Eric Cho, September 29
As many of you have probably noticed, the Blackberry development team has been slowly moving from proprietary IDEs to the plug-in model for Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.
I'm not going to pretend like I know anything about the Visual Studio plug-ins but I did get a chance to play with MDS studio 2.0 beta plug-in for Eclipse.
The first order of business was to convert existing applications to 2.0 which ended up being quite the chore.
More after the break...
The importing of existing projects was intuitive enough, with one exception: it didn't work. Only after posting a question in the Blackberry forums and a bit of back and forth with Mark Sohm from the Blackberry Development team, did I find out that this is a problem with the plug-in itself. Let's chalk that up to the beta-ness of the product.
Aside from that, MDS Studio 2.0 has a few new enhancements that provide very useful. For one thing, it's on Eclipse which is familiar to most of us. Secondly everything about the scripting is just a bit easier. There is now a code-assist and support for script libraries. If you've worked with prior versions, you'll know what I'm talking about when I say that having a script file for each function is annoying.
Not only is the development of the JavaScript easier but debugging as well. We now have the "luxury" of breakpoints, watch windows and all the other blissful things we have come to love about debugging.
Apparently there are also enhancements to the GPS notification where the application can notify us via JavaScript of our location. I haven't had the chance to utilize this yet but it sure sounds cool.
So all in all, it's a nice step up from the previous version of MDS Studio. Which now begs the question... will Blackberry provide us developers with a single installation of Eclipse with both the JDE and MDS Studio plug-ins? *hint hint*
