Blackberry Email Simulator in Eclipse JDE

There are two separate programs in Blackberry JDE:

• MDS - required for working with internet


• ESS - Email simulator, which pushes emails to Blackberry simulator and receives emails from it

Before using Eclipse JDE I always run both programs in different windows and sometimes (or always) it was impossible to use them simultaneously.

After eclipse plugin had appeared, the whole process of development and debugging was changed - eclipse runs application in simulator, launches MDS and allows using debugger just by one click, however there is no option to run ESS with simulator.

Fortunately, there is such option is MDS property file which is located at /eclipse/plugins/net.rim.eide.componentpack4.3.0_4.3.0.8/components/MDS/config/rimpublic.property. Look at section "Email" and you could find all options which are in the ESS user interface. So now, you are able to run MDS with ESS and work with internet and email as well on your Blackberry simulator.

Blackberry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse

RIM published plugin for eclipse for development application for Blacberry instead of ugly JDE. I don't know how it is possible to develop application in the Blackberry JDE, so I've been using my favorite IDE Eclipse for editing and rapc ant task or J2ME Polish for building application, and for debugging JDWP + MDS + ESS were used. Things like profiler and memory statistics I've never used.

Now RIM included all of this into Eclipse plugin, so it is possible to develop, build, run and debug in Eclipse without opening separate applications.
If you use simulator, Eclipse Plugin will deploy application or midlet automatically.
Using console in JDWP was not very comfortable, so now you can enjoy seeing Blackberry console straight in Eclipse.

However there are some disadvantages. Although it is possible to use already installed tools you have to download full install which includes Eclipse Europa, MDS, ESS, Simulators, API Documentation and everything JDE had before. And besides, there is no update install.

I'd rather downloaded not a huge plugin for my eclipse and specified locations to installed tools (MDS, Simulators etc) in the configuration. I'm sure, that it might've been just about 3-5 Mb.

Another thing, which I think is absolutely unnecessary, is creating Blackberry workspace. It might be necessary for existing programs to work like rapc, but I think that there is no any sense in this.

For now I'm going to make possible and simple to debug applications which are built using J2ME Polish using the plugin.

Phun 2D physics

I don't want to write about Phun a lot, because you can understand what it is by looking the demo:



You can get it and try yourself.

Emil Ernerfeldt, the author, is going to publish source code soon, and I reckon it will be very interesting to read it.

I was really amazed how quick Phun had been developed. The first message on the site about alpha 2 was in October of 2007 and current version is good enough.

So, have a fun!

Gmail now supports ICQ chat

Yesterday Gmail added new feature which allows you to sign into your AOL/ICQ account inside Gmail web interface.

...we are happy to tell you about a new feature we've started to roll out which will enable you to sign into your AIM account and chat with your AIM buddies right inside Gmail. When you log in to AIM through Gmail chat, your AOL buddies will appear in your chat list with friends from your Google Talk network, and you will see the yellow "running man" logo to the right of your AIM friends' screen names. To your AIM friends it will look like you are logged in to AIM as usual...

However, it is not very comfortable to use it when you have got a lot of contacts and it is hard to find someone without groups in contact list. So, I hope that soon it would be possible to use groups in Gmail chat widget.

Comparing the Microsoft and Google tool chains

I believe that everybody who works in not very big development companies would like to know about the process of creating products in companies like Microsoft or Google and which tools do they use. In the «Comparing the Microsoft and Google tool chains» post by Jack Palevich, who had worked in Microsoft and now works in Google, compares tools which are used in both companies.

Personally, I was very surprised that both companies use source control systems like perforce which I don't like. And in generally most of the tools are very similar, however the biggest difference is in the hardware. I wish I had same hardware as Google developers have :-)

Google in China

Latest gossips about forbidding Google, Live.com and Yahoo in China were not confirmed. Even more, Google has bought one of the shortest domain G.cn.

I think, that Baidu should make next turn and buy domain B.cn.

PHP test

I have just passed PHP test with an excellent result :-)