marc paradise

RIM provides us with a powerful API for developing Blackberry applications.  They’re making improvements in the ready availability of good documentation (slowly).  They really seem to be responding to both their community and the threat posed by iPhone and Android.  For all of that, though, their toolchain still sucks.

Presently, we have two supported options for developing Blackberry projects: use the RIM JDE (if you’ve tried to use it, you know that this isn’t an option at all); or use their Eclipse/JDE plugin.  Outside of that, you’re pretty much on your own.

I’m a long-time Netbeans fan — I’ve tried Eclipse multiple times, and I just don’t get along with it.  With a bit of headache and digging, I’ve been able to get most BB development tasks working in Netbeans.   Until this week…

In working on BBSSH, I realized that people may eventually want translations, so I set out to use the provided localization features of the Blackberry platform. (Also, all those raw GUI-related strings in my code were annoying me.) Unfortunately, because I don’t fall into the “JDE” or “Eclipse” categories mentioned above, I fell into the third: pretty much on my own.  In hopes of preventing the next person who attempts this from falling into the same category, I figured I would write up how I worked this.  Note that this isn’t necessarily the best or the only way – but it does work, and it does not add a lot of pain to the process.

This tutorial assumes you are familiar with Netbeans, and have some familiarity with the JDE. Read on for more. For the impatient, you can skip straight down to “3. The solution”.

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I have long been a fan of Karl von Randow’s midlet SSH client, “MidpSSH“.  I’ve been using it for years now on various model Blackberry devices, and overall have been satisfied with it.  However, I have always wished it was a bit more tailored to Blackberry’s feature set — I even looked at the only commercial Blackberry SSH client on the market  in hopes of finding something a bit more BB-specific.  While it had some good ideas, the commercial client did not work very well on my device, making that a dead end.

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