BlackBerry Hacks

Chapter 9. Application Development

Hacks 94–100: Introduction

Over the last several months, an explosion of new BlackBerry applications has hit the market. If there was ever any doubt about the viability of the BlackBerry as a development platform, it has been reduced to a whimper. There are applications for getting real-time stock quotes [Hack #70] , spellchecking [Hack #65] , even a bartending program.

If you speak a little Java, you can brew up your own application to communicate with web servers [Hack #94] . Best of all, there are no license fees to get started—in fact, you don’t even need to own a BlackBerry device [Hack #93] . RIM provides free access to the BlackBerry JDE, a development kit that includes an IDE, or integrated development environment. The other nice feature of the BlackBerry platform is there are a variety of ways [Hack #97] for your users to install your program, even over the air wherever they happen to be. Use the hacks in this chapter to get started.

Create HTTP Connections

Create simple HTTP requests from a BlackBerry application.

The most powerful feature of programming BlackBerry applications is having the ability to make your applications perform wireless network connections to servers. The most common network connection type is HTTP allowing applications to connect to web servers anywhere on the Internet.

Create HTTP GET Requests

After importing the java.io.* and javax.microedition.io.* packages, here’s is all you need in J2ME to create an HTTP ...