that’s whacked

Building & simulating Blackberry apps with the Blackberry SDK on Mac OS X

Wednesday, Jun 2. 2010  –  Category: Development, Rdio

As I recently blogged, I just started working at Rdio. Specifically I’m working on the Android app. A fair amount of code is shared between our Android & Blackberry app (since they both use a common platform of Java). Since I’ve been making changes to the Android code, I wanted to be able to build the Blackberry app to make sure I didn’t regress or break anything there.

I’ve got a shiny new MacBook Pro, and well… it just feels like sacrilege to be running Windows on this thing. So I set out to see if I could get the latest Blackberry SDK working on OS X. And… well, it works! Requisite screenshot:

I owe a huge amount to this blog post, which I used and simply updated and hacked around with the latest rev of the SDK… I can’t claim much creativity for my steps since it’s clearly a derivative of azizuysal’s work.

Downloads

• Eclipse 3.5 (I used the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers package)
• Blackberry SDK/JDE for Eclipse (As of the time of this writing, I got BlackBerryJDEPluginFull1.1.2.201004161203-16.exe)
• bb-ant-tools (I got bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin.zip)
• mpowerplayer (I got build 1185)

SDK & ant Setup

1. Install Eclipse wherever.  It doesn’t matter where.
2. Create a Blackberry directory for your Eclipse workspace and to hold the SDK.  I used /Users/stevel/ws/Blackberry.
3. Launch Eclipse and specify that directory (/Users/stevel/ws/Blackberry) as your workspace directory.
4. Launch a terminal and do the following:
   1. mkdir $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK
   2. cd /tmp
   3. unzip $HOME/Downloads/mpp-sdk-1185.zip mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify
      unzip mpp-sdk-1185.zip mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify
   4. unzip $HOME/Downloads/BlackBerryJDEPluginFull1.1.2.201004161203-16.exe
      1. (this will create two directories: InstallerData & Windows)
   5. unzip InstallerData/Disk1/InstData/Resource1.zip “C/ABS10/Components/EclipsePlugin/1.1.2/EclipsePlugin/installer/InstallAnywhere/InstallerData/EJDE\ Plugins1ae15a8ca04czgiasf.jar”
      1. (this will create a retardedly long subdirectory path, as you can see)
   6. unzip C/ABS10/Components/EclipsePlugin/1.1.2/EclipsePlugin/installer/InstallAnywhere/InstallerData/EJDE\ Plugins1ae15a8ca04czgiasf.jar
      1. (this will create two subdirectories: features & plugins)
   7. rm -rf C_ InstallerData Windows features
   8. cd $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK
   9. mkdir net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25
   10. cd net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25
   11. unzip /tmp/plugins/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25.jar
   12. mv /tmp/mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify components/bin
   13. chmod +x components/bin/preverify
   14. cd ..
   15. mkdir bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin
   16. cd bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin
   17. unzip $HOME/Downloads/bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin.zip
   18. rm -rf /tmp/plugins /tmp/mpp-sdk
5. Now go back to Eclipse, and go to the Eclipse>Preferences menu
6. Go to Java>Build Path>User Libraries and click New
   1. Enter “Blackberry 1.1.2″ as the library name.
   2. Click Add Jars and select $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/lib/netrimapi.jar
   3. Then select Javadoc location and choose the $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/docs/api directory
7. Go to Ant>Runtime in the Eclipse preferences
   1. Under Global Entries, click Add External Jars
   2. Choose $HOME/ws/Blackberry/bb-ant-tools-1.2.8-bin/bb-ant-tools.jar
8. Click Okay and save the Preferences
9. Add $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.05.0.0.25/components/bin to your PATH via your .bashrc file

Building Hello World

1. Follow the exact steps (heck, use his sample code) in the blog I linked to above.  It works perfectly.
2. Only hitch is make sure to update the jde.home & simulator.home properties in your build.xml to the right paths of course.

Running the Simulator

1. Call me nuts, but I didn’t feel like install MacPorts.  Instead, I built my own Wine from source.  To do this, just follow the instructions here.  I installed it to /usr/local.
2. Grab winetricks and put it somewhere in your path (curl http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks > $HOME/bin/winetricks)
3. Install various winetricks packages:
   1. gdiplus msxml3 msxml4 msxml6
   2. (yes really, I had to install all 3 for some reason.  I have no idea why)
4. cd $HOME/ws/Blackberry/SDK/net.rim.ejde.componentpack5.0.0_5.0.0.25/components/simulator
5. cat 9550.bat | sed -e ‘s/^M//’ > 9550.sh
   1. note the ^M isn’t a literal ^M, it’s the ctrl code for <Return>, hit Ctrl-V and then the Return key to generate it.
6. Edit the 9550.sh file and make it look like:
   1. #!/bin/sh
   2. cd “dirname $0“
   3. /usr/local/bin/wine fledge.exe /app=Jvm.dll /handheld=9550 /session=9550 /app-param=DisableRegistration /app-param=JvmAlxConfigFile:9550.xml /data-port=0x4d44 /data-port=0x4d4e /pin=0x2100000A
7. Fixup the 9550.xml file

1. cat 9550.xml | sed -e ‘s/^M//’ > /tmp/foo
2. mv /tmp/foo 9550.xml