Developing first Blackberry application

Introduction

I have been contributor to FlickrEdit Java based application for last two plus years, and obviously my photos are all stored at Flickr. When I got Blackberry Storm I started looking for application that would allow me to view my photo sets on my Storm using the full screen size, but I couldn’t find any. I decided to write the application and this blog should document the process.

Following is a compilation of links, comments and hints I collected and which I am using for my BlackBerry application development.

Blackberry Developer Resources

• Getting started with BlackBerry JDE
• Developer Tutorials
• Useful links for novice and experienced programmers
• BlackBerry Developer Videos
• Developer Forums
• Knowledge Base Articles
• Programming BlackBerry with J2ME
• BlackBerry Programming Tutorials
• Create BlackBerry Application with Open Source Tools
• Blackberry J2ME Development
• Creating a BlackBerry Game
• BlackBerry development with Ant
• BlackBerry JDK Tools – Getting Started
• Hello BlackBerry!

Setting up Blackberry Development environment

If you spend most of your day in Eclipse like me, you will be glad to find out that Research In Motion (RIM) offers great Eclipse plugin to develop Blackberry applications, BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse. You can install the plugin into existing Eclipse installation, or you can install full Eclipse 3.4 with Blackberry plugin. Current version 1.0 uses Eclipse 3.4 and it is not officially supported on Windows 7 and most importantly the Blackberry simulators do not work well on 64bit Windows Vista or Windows 7. Windows OS is a requirement. Here are the steps to install Blackberry plugin:

• Download BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse and install it
• Download the Eclipse Software Update for the BlackBerry JDE v4.7 Component Pack and install it from Eclipse Help/Software Updates… dialog (install from Archive)
• Download and install standalone BlackBerry Java Development Environment v4.7.

The standalone pack contains standalone IDE (looks like NetBeans based) that you can use to view, build and run sample applications. You can find the IDE in Start/Programs/Research In Motion menu. The Research In Motion menu also contains BlackBerry JDE API Reference. You can load sample applications from installed standalone BlackBerry Java Development Environment to Eclipse with File/Import…/BlackBerry/Existing BlackBerry Projects into Workspace.

To run sample application like HelloWorld Demo, select main class source file and use Run (orDebug) as/BleckBerry Simulator. Default simulator is BB 83xx, so you should:

• In Window/Preferences/BlackBerry JDE/Installed Components and select BlackBerry JDE Component Package v4.7
• In Run/Run(or Debug) Configurations… select BlackBerry Simulator/DebugServer and in Simulator tab select appropriate simulator, for me it was 9530-JDE

After that you can run an application in appropriate BB  simulator, note that application in BB Storm 9530 is located in Downloads folder.

MDS simulator
MDS Simulator is part of the standalone BlackBerry JDE. This software simulates the communication traffic between a real BlackBerry and the RIM network. Without the MDS simulator running, the BlackBerry device simulator is unable to communicate with hosts on the Internet. You can configure your Eclipse Run/Debug configuration to start MDS simulator when you start BlackBerry simulator.

E-mail simulator
The JDE also includes an e-mail simulator. Because so much of the operation of a BlackBerry is e-mail-related, it’s a good idea to make use of the e-mail simulator. This permits applications to test e-mail-related functionality.

Application Icon
Every application should have an icon. Check this tutorial about how to set project icon in Eclipse, and check HowTo Create an icon for an application for icon sizes.

Blackberry Application

BlackBerry application extends UiApplication class. An application consists of set of screen pushed (UiApplication.getUiApplication().pushScreen()) to the application screen stack (only top screen on the stack is displayed).

You can remove the top screen from the stack by using UiApplication.getUiApplication().popScreen(). Push screen is non-modal, non-blocking,  you can use UiApplication.getUiApplication().pushModalScreen() if you need application to block till the screen is closed.

Also keep in mind that you can create a PopupScreen, not just a MainScreen or FullScreen.  A popup screen allows you to display a floating screen that hovers on top of whatever is behind it. You can push/display this popup screen normally or modally. This is much like a dialog box frame in Swing.

BlackBerry UI

• BlackBerry Sample application labs
• Fields Reference
• ListField Example
• How To – Create a color ListField
• John Banks UI tutorials
• BlackBerry UI Framework overview
• Display web page in browser
• Display row of images
• Displaying images

Deploying Application

Guide how to deploy application is available here.

Additional useful information about signing and OTA deployment is here.

Linux, Ubuntu is still not good enough to replace Windows or Mac OSX

I had two old desktops (2GHz single core) and I decided to gut both and create one desktop that would run new Ubuntu 9.10.

I re-build the computer hardware after some experimenting with hard drive and DVD drive jumpers and made it bootable.

I then installed Ubuntu 9.10, install itself was a pleasant experiance comparable to Windows 7 install experience. Everything went smoothly.

After reboot I started exploring Ubuntu OS (I am running Ubuntu 9.10 in VMWare Player on my laptop). To my surprise Ubuntu did not recognize by name any other computers on my intranet (mix of Windows Vista and Windows 7 machines).  I can ping the other machines by IP but not by name. Network explorer did see the other machines by name and could access their shared hard drives, so Samba was working OK, but networking name resolution wasn’t working (kind of big deal when you are using DHCP).

I spent few hours poking around and googling but was unable to resolve the issue. I was also not able to add my networked printer, I did not find any way by using UI to add a printer (must be well hidden). To give Ubuntu some credit, my NAS MyWorldBook was recognized by Network explorer/Samba, that was not the case in Ubuntu 8.x and 9.04.

After about a day of playing with and tweaking Ubuntu, I cut my loses and installed Windows XP pro. The install was without any problems, networking works as expected, and I can add my network printer.

Conclusion

Installing and running Ubuntu was major disappointment. While I am sure with enough googling and editing some config files, I would be able to make Ubuntu (networking, printer) work properly, I cannot imagine that person without computer and system administration experience can install and use Ubuntu. I am part time system administrator for small business, and I wouldn’t introduce Ubuntu based machines into the network after my last experience. It looks like Windows are save for now and there is not real thread from Ubuntu to displays Windows any time soon. I am disappointed also because I was and still am big fan of Linux, and I thought Ubuntu is slowly improving to the level, where it is going to be able to compete with Windows and Mac OSX.

I think that main reason of Linux still has problems to catch up with Windows and Mac OSX is the huge fragmentation of the Linux world (so many distributions, so much work duplicated), it remind me Unix situation 15-20 years ago.

Upgrading to Windows 7

I am part time system administrator for small health-care provider, so I know that Windows 7 are in my future with purchases of the new computers (it is harder and harder to get new computer with Windows XP).

I already tried to install Windows 7 on my 6 year old HP laptop, and the experience wasn’t quite positive, see my blog here. But most of the technical publications rates Windows 7 quite well, so I decided to upgrade my main work/development laptop, Thinkpad R61 to Windows 7 Pro. At the same time I purchased Asus Eee PC netbook with Windows 7 Starter Edition.

Installation

My Thinkpad R61 had Windows Vista Home edition (32 bit), so the OS did not use all of the 4Gb memory in the laptop. Because I couldn’t do Windows 7 update (update doesn’t work going from Vista Home to Windows 7 Pro), I decided to bite the bullet and do the clean install of Windows 7 Pro 64bit to make use of full 4Gb of memory. I performed full backup and ran Easy Transfer Wizard (to Windows 7). Then ran Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and uninstalled and/or upgraded a few applications advisor recommended to uninstall or upgrade (mainly ThinkVantage, Thinkpad applications, see here).

Installation went smoothly and it took about an hour. I then ran Windows update a few times to get the latest and greatest. Everything was running well NVidia drivers and other drivers (camera, audio) loaded well, networking was working, I could easily connect to my MyWorldBook NAS, and to my HP network printer (this might be the first Windows OS where the networking is working without glitches . I then run Windows Easy Transfer to restore my settings.

As always, while some applications are running out of the box like Firefox, Eclipse, Notepad++ and others, some Windows applications have nasty habit to depend on registry entries, .dll libraries in Windows\system32 etc, and they had to be reinstalled. This is one of the major pains of upgrading or re-installing Windows OS. IMHO Microsoft should offer better application model to application developers so they can build applications that are easy to migrate between Windows OS installation, and application developers should do better job writing applications that do not depend on resources that disappear during Windows OS install/re-install.
BTW, I am using 2 disk partitions, C: and D: drive, and I do install most of the applications on D: drive, which makes it easier to install/re-install Windows OS. Even with that, it took me about a day to get my laptop in shape.

Windows 7 install creates Windows.old folder with core of the old (in my case Windows Vista) OS, so you can use it to recover applications and data missed by transfer wizard. Biggest installation disappointment was that Start Menu\Programs disappeared and they were also missing in Windows.old folders, so I had to rebuild them from scratch. That in itself is not trivial because I couldn’t find a way to access Start Menu folder (Permission Denied) with Windows Explorer even with administrator privileges. Fortunately I found this article, and downloaded and used SurF Explorer.

I do not use Programs menu that much, I instead maintain and share between my computers custom toolbars (folders in C:\&D (for development), C:\&U for utilities etc) which show up as D >> toolbar and that popup applications (folder content) when clicked on >>  in the toolbar. I use these toolbars for easy access to applications. These custom toolbars saved me from some more work chasing down all the applications and creating their links.

Windows XP mode is not installed with Windows 7 by default, here is the Microsoft documentation how to install Windows XP mode.

Few Problems

• Desktop icons suddenly disappeared after reboot, it took me few minutes to find Desktop popup menu View/Show desktop icons that got unchecked for some reason
• Power management is biggest problem ad disappointment so far. At night I just close the lid of my laptop and then come in the morning and open it. In two of the three days using Windows 7 after opening the lid in the morning the display was dark, there was no laptop activity (even if OS was not shut down), and I couldn’t wake up the laptop no matter what I did. I have to do hard shutdown holding I/O button and restart Windows 7. This worked seamlessly in Windows Vista. I am trying to set all Power options to Never, but so far laptop wake up function is failing!
• Creating file associations is worse than it was in Vista or XP, the UI doesn’t allow you to specify details of the command, and executing java .jar files requires -jar option to execute a .jar file (double-click). I had to search and edit registry to set .jar file association with -jar option. This was actually problem with me installing JDK 32bit instead of JDK 64bit. After I uninstalled 32bit and installed 64bit, everything was working well, and .jar associations were set properly.

Applications I had to re-install

• VMWare player
• Snagit
• PDANet – used http://junefabrics.com/pdanet/x64.php to install 64b driver, and used old PDANet 1.2 for Blackberry
• HAVA
• FileZilla site manager, here is how to find and restore site manager items
• Set environment variables, I forgot to save env. variables (why there is no Import/Export for env. variables on Windows?), so I had to recreate quite a few of them (JAVA_HOME, GROOVY_HOME etc.)
• Cygwin
• VNC
• Blackberry Desktop
• Logmein
• Lastpass
• VLC Player
• Java

Conclusion

So far I do agree with experts, that Windows 7 is the best Windows OS so far, yes even better than Windows XP. After disabling UAC (which was much easier than in Vista), I am happy Windows 7 user (with exception of power management mentioned above). Also Windows 7 Starter on our Asus Eee PC is running well with no glitches (on that laptop power management works as it should, have it set to sleep on close lid, wake up on open).

 

Stopping or interrupting Java hanging thread

As most of Java developers know and experienced, some Java frameworks including core Java libraries do have nasty habit to run for very, very loooong time or hang indefinitely. Classic example is Java regex library which can cause stack overflow, or it can hang indefinitely.

In order to prevent the whole application from hanging and to allow to stop or interrupt the offending hanging thread, I am using timeout thread that checks if the watched thread finished in allotted time, and if it did not the timeout thread interrupts the watched, hanging thread.

Abruptly stopping or interrupting a thread from different thread is not well supported in Java especially when Thread.stop() method was deprecated, see How to stop a thread article.

But the problem is that Java offers nothing better to forcefully interrupt the offending hanging thread. Following is an example code of the TimeoutThread:

package com.lingoport.scanner.util;

import java.util.Date;

/** Stop a thread after a given timeout has elapsed
* <P>
* A simple timeout class.  You give it a thread to watch and a timeout
* in milliseconds.  After the timeout has elapsed, the thread is killed
* with a Thread.stop().  If the thread finishes successfully before then,
* you can cancel the timeout with a done() call; you can also re-use the
* timeout on the same thread with the reset() call.
* <P>
*
*/

public class TimeoutThread implements Runnable {

private final Thread targetThread;
private long millis;
private final Thread watcherThread;
private boolean loop;
private boolean enabled;
private static final boolean TIMEOUT_DISABLED = System.getProperty("disable.timeout") != null;

/**
* Constructor. Give it a thread to watch, and a timeout in milliseconds.
* After the timeout has elapsed, the thread gets killed. If you want
* to cancel the kill, just call done().
*
* @param targetThread
* @param millis
*/
public TimeoutThread(Thread targetThread, long millis) {
this.targetThread = targetThread;
this.millis = millis;
if (TIMEOUT_DISABLED) {
watcherThread = null;
enabled = false;
} else {
watcherThread = new Thread(this);
enabled = true;
watcherThread.start();
// Hack - pause a bit to let the watcher thread get started.
try {
Thread.sleep(100);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
}
}

/**
* Constructor, current thread.
*
* @param millis
*/
public TimeoutThread(long millis) {
this(Thread.currentThread(), millis);
}

/**
* Call this when the target thread has finished.
*/
public synchronized void done() {
loop = false;
enabled = false;
notify();
}

/**
* Call this to restart the wait from zero.
*/
public synchronized void reset() {
loop = true;
notify();
}

/**
* Call this to restart the wait from zero with a different timeout value.
*
* @param millis
*/
public synchronized void reset(long millis) {
this.millis = millis;
reset();
}

/*
* The watcher thread - from the Runnable interface.
* This has to be pretty anal to avoid monitor lockup, lost threads, etc.
*
*  (non-Javadoc)
* @see java.lang.Runnable#run()
*/
public synchronized void run() {
if (TIMEOUT_DISABLED) return;
Thread me = Thread.currentThread();
me.setPriority(Thread.MAX_PRIORITY);
if (enabled) {
do {
loop = false;
try {
wait(millis);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
}
} while (enabled && loop);
}
// The call stop() is deprecated, but Java doesn't offer anything better
if (enabled && targetThread.isAlive()) {
targetThread.stop();
done();
}
}

// Test main
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println((new Date()) + "  Setting ten-second timeout...");
TimeoutThread tk = new TimeoutThread(10000);
try {
double f = 1.;
System.out.println((new Date()) + "  Starting execution of long loop...");
for(double i = 0; i < 1.0E99; i++) f = f * i;
System.out.println((new Date()) + "  Another execution of long loop...");
for(double i = 0; i < 1.0E99; i++) f = f * i;
tk.done();
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println((new Date()) + "  Caught Exception");
} catch (ThreadDeath td) {
System.out.println((new Date()) + "  Caught ThreadDeath");
}
System.out.println((new Date()) + "  Finished!");

}

}

This solution seems to be working quite well, and the offending hanging thread (caused for example by Java regex) can catch ThreadDeath exception, recover appropriately and continue work.

The only problem I encountered so far is that it doesn’t play well with Eclipse debugging, that is why I disable the TimoutThread while debugging the application using disable.timeout system property.

I know, that this is not great solution, but it works, and I couldn’t find any better solution (BTW, Thread.interrupt() does not work in this case). Let me know if you have better solution.

 

Why I am not Mac user

I have small one man software development consulting company, High Country Computing. Sometimes I need to deliver product(s) that needs to be tested on Apple hardware.
I used to be Apple fan while starting with personal computing in 1988 or so with AppleII. But I switched to Windows and Linux based computers in early 1990ies and never looked back (who would pay $500-$1500 more for inferior hardware .

Because of need to test software applications on Apple and Mac OSX hardware, I finally caved in and decided to buy Mini Mac. Unfortunately, the experience was terrible and I will not buy any Apple made product any time soon.

I bought Mini Mac from reseller and the Mac didn’t even boot. The only solution I was offered by Apple customer support was to bring it to authorized repair shop, which is quite inconvenient considering I live high in the mountains and I would have to drive over 100 miles (Lenovo, Dell, HP let you ship the computer for repair in their expense). It was my first experience in 15 years with Apple, and I regret buying it, and I will not recommend to my friends or at work (I am part time system administrator for small healthcare provider) to even consider Apple. I contacted Apple customer support for help, but the customer support guy was very, very unhelpful, and he was quite rude. My impression was that Apple support is terrible compared to Lenovo, HP, Dell (have hands on experience with all of them). Fortunately the Mac reseller, where I purchased the Mini Mac, was much more customer friendly than Apple and took the broken Mac back.

See you Apple!

Installing and Uninstalling Windows7

I have tried to install Windows7 RC on my HP Pavillion zd7000 laptop (1.25Gb memory, 2×3.0GHz processor) with Windows XP SP3. The installation went OK, the only problem was running Windows7 compatibility check application which hanged and never finished.

The problems came after the install, and there was enough of them to force me to uninstall Windows7 and restore good old Windows XP.
Here is the list of problems:

• Windows XP cannot be upgraded, it requires full OS install and the install partition has to have at least 6GB free
• I had hard time to redirect video from laptop to external monitor
• The Windows7 migration application failed to install, so I was forced to moved the Documents and Setting and Program Files from Windows.old manually (painful)
• I couldn’t find NVIDIA driver, so the screen resolution was only 1024×768 (XP is 1600×1200)
• Networking had problems connecting to printer (HP J6400), and to my NAS (WD MyWorldBook), sometimes it worked, sometimes not

Fortunately there is relatively easy way to uninstall Windows7 and restore Windows XP, see this article for details.

Honestly, I am not sure why all the “expert” reviews are so positive, I have Windows XP laptop, another laptop with Windows Vista, and also desktop with Windows Vista (64b). Base on my one day experience I do not see Windows7 being worth upgrading and they are definitely NOT dramatically better than Windows XP or Windows Vista.
I still like Windows XP (they just work), but for last year plus, I mainly use Vista and after disabling UAC, I became Vista fan. It seems to me that the improvements in Windows7 are mainly cosmetic and there are quite a few things (and remind you, it is RC, so maybe they will have time to fix some issues .

I am system administrator for small business (20+ desktops, 2 servers), and I will stay with Windows XP for as long as I can. No plan for me to upgrade to Windows7 any time soon! I was planning to spend $150 to get the Windows7 family pack for my home computers, but looks like I can now spend the money at Starbucks .

What is your experience with Windows7?

Creating database schema using JDBC

Unfortunately there is no database agnostic way to create database schema in Java using ORM tools like Hibernate, and even JDBC doesn’t offer database agnostic way to create new database schema.

Here is a JDBC code I use to create new database schema for MySql and PostgreSql:

Statement stmt = null;
 Connection con = null;
 try {
 String url = configuration.getProperty("hibernate.connection.url");
 con = getConnection(url,
 configuration.getProperty("hibernate.connection.username"),
 configuration.getProperty("hibernate.connection.password"));

 stmt = con.createStatement();
 if (!con.getMetaData().getTables(null,"mydb","mytable",null).next()){
 if (url.startsWith("jdbc:postgresql")) {
 int count = stmt.executeUpdate("CREATE DATABASE \"MyDb\"  WITH OWNER = " +
 configuration.getProperty("hibernate.connection.username"));
 } else if (url.startsWith("jdbc:mysql")) {
 int count = stmt.executeUpdate("CREATE SCHEMA mydb");
 } else {
 throw new SQLException("DB not supported");
 }
 }
 } catch (Exception e) {
 // log failure
 } finally {
 if (stmt != null) try {stmt.close();} catch (Exception ex) {}
 if (con != null) try {con.close();} catch (Exception ex) {}
 }

private static Connection getConnection(String url, String user, String password) throws SQLException {
 String urlPart = getUrlPart(url);
 return DriverManager.getConnection(urlPart, user, password);
 }

private static String getUrlPart(String url) {
 int idx = url.lastIndexOf('/');
 if (idx < 0) return url;
 String part = url.substring(0, idx);
 if (url.startsWith("jdbc:postgresql")) {
 return part + "/postgres";
 } else if (url.startsWith("jdbc:mysql")) {
 return part + "/mysql";
 }
 return url;
 }

Let me know if you find better way to create database schema in Java.

Platform dependent line separator handling in Swing JTextArea

If you wish to support platform dependent line separator handling in Swing JTextArea you have to use its read() and write() methods to load or persist the text in the JTextArea. Internally text area remembers the line separators and converts all of them to \n. When the text area is saved into file using write(), the line separators are converted to its original value.

Here is sample code to read the file into text area:

public class MyTextArea extends JTextArea {
...

try {
 FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(sourceFile);
 reader = new InputStreamReader(fis);
 read(reader, null);
} finally {
 if (reader != null) {
 try {
 reader.close();
 } catch (Exception ex) {
 // log exception
 }
 }
 }
}

Here is sample code to write text area into a file:

<pre>
<pre>public class MyTextArea extends JTextArea {
...</pre>
</pre>
try {
 writer = new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(newFile));
 write(writer);
 } finally {
 if (writer != null) {
 try {
 writer.close();
 } catch (Exception ex) {
 // log exception
 }
 }
 }
}

Do not read the file content using Reader directly to get the content of the file and than call JTextArea.setText() it will not remember the line separator and it will keep the original line separator in the text area, so for example if the file uses Windows line separator \r\n, you will have to press Delete/Backspace key twice to delete line terminator. Pressing Enter key will insert \n and might cause inconsistent line separators (e.g. mixture of \r\n and \n) in the file when saved.

Do not write the file content using Writer directly to save the content of the text area in the file and after call JTextArea.getText(), it  would save the line separators as they are currently in the text area without converting them to the original state.

Check this thread for more info.

Excellent Groovy presentation

Excellent presentation about Groovy patterns highlighting advantages of Groovy:
Seven Groovy usage patterns for Java developers | Software Development Videos

(Re) installing Ruby on Ubuntu

I ran into trouble on Ubuntu 7.10 and had to reinstall Ruby, It wasn’t smooth sailing, so here is what I did to make ruby and gems work again:

• sudo apt-get remove gem
• sudo apt-get remove ruby
• rm -rf /var/lib/gems
• rm -rf /usr/lib/ruby
• sudo apt-get install ruby
• sudo apt-get install rubygems
• sudo apt-get install irb
• sudo apt-get install ri
• sudo apt-get install rdoc
• sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev
• sudo apt-get install build-essential
• sudo gem install rake
• sudo apt-get install rake
• sudo gem install ruby-debug-ide
• sudo gem install hpricot -v 0.5
• sudo gem install activesuport
• sudo gem install builder
• sudo gem install hoe
• sudo gem install rspec
• sudo gem install ruby-debug-base
• sudo gem install ruby-debug-ide

Here is a slightly obsolete link http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/RailsOnUbuntu.