During BlackBerry DevCon we heard a lot about the new tools being offered to BlackBerry developers for building applications. One of those tools was the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK and its great HTML5 capabilities. Now that DevCon is over -- RIM has released the latest BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Smatphones bumping it up to v2.2 for release with the open source packages also available via Github.
What’s new in this release?
- Mac OSX Support – Need we say more? This very exciting and highly demanded feature is now available. A Mac version of the WebWorks SDK installer is available for developers to use and build WebWorks applications using OSX.
- Payment API – the same API that was recently made available for the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ SDK for PlayBook OS can now be used to sell digital goods through WebWorks applications running on BlackBerry Smartphones. This feature gives developers an incredible monetization opportunity for increasing the revenue of their applications. Read more about our payment service.
- BB7 net_rim_api.jar – The underlying API library used by the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK has been updated to the BlackBerry® 7 developer APIs. This means that WebWorks developers can now create their own JavaScript Extensions and make use of APIs found in BlackBerry Device Software versions 5.0, BlackBerry 6 and BlackBerry 7.
- BBM APIs – Developers can now find the BlackBerry WebWorks APIs needed to integrate their applications with the BBM Social platform automatically included as part of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK. Read more about the BBM Social Platform SDK.
- Side by side installs – The installer has been modified to produce a standalone install of the WebWorks SDK for Smartphone. This feature gives developers the ability to build different versions of their applications based on different versions of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK, which is often a requirement for supporting production code.
- Memory leak fixes – many performance and stability improvements have been made to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK to fix memory problems encountered with WebWorks applications running on BlackBerry 6 and 7 OS smartphones.
If you head on over to the new developer resources pages you'll find both the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Smartphone and Tablet OS available in the v2.2 variety. Also, you can grab Ripple right from that page as well so that you can test out your apps before publishing them to BlackBerry App World.
