One of our friends at BlackBerry let us know about a new unofficial tool, GAP (Graphical Aid Plus) for HTML5 WebWorks development.  This tool eliminates the need of using command line for various tasks when developing for WebWorks. Though I prefer coding Cascades apps myself, this tool is really cool and may even entice me to tinker a bit more with WebWorks. With that being said, let’s take a closer look at this tool.

Check out the complete walkthrough of GAP on the BlackBerry Devblog post here. This tool provides a GUI that allows you to do a handful of things:

  • Request signing keys
  • Register signing keys
  • Backup signing keys
  • Restore signing keys
  • Create and install debug tokens
  • Build WebWorks apps
  • Install .bar files in the simulator or any device

All of these tasks are straight forward. I can personally attest that the 10 step process explained in the Devblog post made signing WebWorks apps extremely easy. Plus the video walkthrough of the tool explains everything you will need to know.

No joke, using this tool was the first time I had ever signed a WebWorks app. After requesting and receiving new signing keys (which only takes a few hours via email), I was up and running in about 5 minutes and could sign apps for deployment to BlackBerry World.

So if you are afraid of the command line or just don’t want to bother with it, definitely check out this tool! Either way I am glad to see another great tool that makes it faster/easier to develop for BlackBerry.
 

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