The BlackBerry DevCon 2010 closed it’s doors a couple of days ago and to put the conclusion first, I have become a new evangelist for the BlackBerry6 platform. It supports W3C widgets, well … in a way ;). The core message I took away: web technologies have become first class citizens on the new BlackBerry platform. And we from uxebu really love this, as you can imagine.
First I want to thank RIM for sending us two Torch devices. Right away I navigated to the embedJS tests and I didn’t expect it differently, the tests passed without any problem, 100% passed tests. Actually I expected the tests to pass lightning fast, the time it took was ok, but not lightning fast, unfortunately. The test suite executed in about 14 seconds, on the iPhone4 it took about 10. To be fair the processor power and the system architectures are completely different and not really comparable, but the user experience counts in the end. We have heard that the RIM guys are hard working on improvements and speeding up the device, there is some cool stuff to come.
WebKit and WebWorks
The most impressive and revolutionary thing was definitely that BlackBerry brings an 100 points ACID compliant WebKit and runs W3C widgets using it. So there are by default two ways that are even fun to get content onto this platform. You can write mobile websites expecting an a-grade browser and you can write apps, for the so called WebWorks platform (which are W3C widgets inside). All we want. The browser supports CSS transitions and transforms, not 3D though, since there is no GPU in those devices, but you never know what might come next. There is SVG on it, WebSockets, Canvas and a lot more niceties, I just browsed the objects using Object Browser, go try it yourself, on your device.
RIM renamed their widgets that existed already on BlackBerry5 to “WebWorks” and they got completely overhauled. The approach RIM went is pretty close to how PhoneGap works. WebWorks basically is a wrapper written in Java (the native language of BlackBerry) which internally instanciates a WebKit view and provides a bridge into JavaScript where the underlying native functionality is written in Java, of course. The cool thing about it is that this code is completely open source and on github. Unfortunately the build scripts are still not on github, so you would still have to figure out yourself how to use the source from github to package your apps. RIM please push them soon! Currently the executables are the most comfortable way to build your widget.
Back to the API, since the implementation is open source you can easily extend it and make functionality available into JavaScript which currently is not there. So Nikolai’s robotic JavaScript will really become fun and reality on BlackBerry too. Why RIM went this way becomes very obvious when you understand the security concept on BlackBerry. Since all APIs are, in the end, provided by a Java implementation and only “piped” into JavaScript all security restrictions apply to the widget just as if it was a native app. That means if you access GPS in your widget (using JavaScript) the Java function will be called and will be secured the same way as if it would have been called from within a pure Java app. Of course this doesn’t make your widget secure by default, since you are using web technologies you have to take care of writing apps which are not vulnerable by XSS attacs or alike. But it offers really comfortable extendability for this platform and is no workaround to get web technologies onto BlackBerries, I think it’s a very clever approach, good job RIM.
Security
Everybody knows the ridiculous installation dialogs on Android which show you the APIs the app wants to access and the final question if you want to allow the app to access this functionality or not. If you say “no”, the app won’t install. That doesn’t really make me feel that the security concept is very flexible. It’s not giving the user a lot of control. Working with Opera’s widget runtimes already for a while I thought of a concept that would allow a lot kore control for the user and make apps hopefully more successful.
I will use a short example to explain it. Imagine a twitter app that you want to install and that has a lot of functionality but on the first install you only want it to be able to go online to read and send tweets. Functionality like GPS, searching my addressbook or taking pictures with the camera are built in into the app. But as long as i don’t trust the app i don’t want this functionality enabled. So I turn of access to certain APIs upon installation and enable them just when I feel secure and gained trust in the app or had been told by experts that the app is secure. But this is currently not possible on platforms like Android or iPhone. I talked about this idea and told RIM’s Tim Neil about it, in the hope to meet open ears and confirm that this is a good idea. The answer I got surprised me big time: BlackBerry already has this for a while. We got out our Torch devices to look it up, and yes in the menu under “Device / Application Management” you can edit the permissions per app (see picture). Awesome and just right, I love this.
So Opera this was my idea to improve your widget runtime and maybe to jump ahead of the crowd again, I would like it.
Overall the BlackBerry6 platform is very exciting and a lot of thought seem to have gone into it, especially with focus on the web, which is a really good thing. So, I will just step away and try to build the Object Browser as a WebWorks App.