RIM has announced that the BlackBerry Widget SDK is now available for download.
The BlackBerry Widget SDK 1.0 Beta 1 contains the BlackBerry Widget Packager 1.0 Beta 1, a BlackBerry Device Simulator, and a lot of documentation and samples.
The BlackBerry Widget Packager 1.0 Beta 1 is a new tool that allows web developers to package up their web assets into BlackBerry Widgets (small, discrete, standalone web applications that use HTML, CSS and JavaScript). A BlackBerry Widget looks, behaves and has the same security mechanisms as a native BlackBerry application. BlackBerry Widgets can be installed on a BlackBerry smartphone like any native application and can be extended to use device-specific information and data using the BlackBerry Widget APIs.
The sounds very similar to what Palm has done with it’s WebOS SDK and I really like where RIM is going with this. As someone with experience managing development of all varieties of mobile applications, (mobile web, thick-client, thin-client), on a variety of platforms including BlackBerry OS, I’m very excited about this new SDK.
Developing native applications for BlackBerry OS has been a pain in the past because of the multitude of OS versions. Trying to test your applications across a variety of BlackBerry devices is always an expensive and time consuming process. Then when you finally launch, managing and updating applications is always a challenge – especially when doing so across an array of BlackBerry OS versions.
On the other hand, a very thin-client mobile web application like Frugalytics Web Launcher, is very easy to maintain and update but device API’s for the mobile web are very limited and the BlackBerry browser in general is very limited in its capabilities (although that will change soon now that they acquired a mobile browser software company).
The HTML/Javascript widget model is a great happy medium that makes developers lives’ a whole lot easier while maintaining a great end user experience. I look forward to working with this new SDK.