Blackberry packaging and signing

ekdikeo

I've written a couple of .bat files to help me out with packaging and distributing to emulator, as well as with signing.

Make sure before you submit your app to RIM's market, that you go through the SIGNING steps -- their portal will accept an unsigned file, which they will likely reject, and you'll get to change the name of your app, because it'll be stuck forever in the system with an unsigned file id. (and you thought HP's catalog was primitive - just try deciphering RIM's error messages .. they might as well just replace them all with "You're hosed, pick a new app name, and start over.")

packaging and distributing to emulator, assuming that you have all the files in their default locations, you have the 7-zip zip utility installed. Modify your filenames and output paths to taste.

del /q gvbb.zip
"c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" u -xr!*.bat -xr!*.zip -xr!.git* gvbb.zip *
set JAVA_HOME="c:\program files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\jre"
"c:\program files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\bbwp\bbwp" c:\users\eric\ripplesites\gv\gvbb.zip -o c:\temp\gvbb
"c:\program files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\bbwp\blackberry-tablet-sdk\bin\blackberry-deploy" -installApp -password blackberry -device 192.168.109.128 -package c:\temp\gvbb\gvbb.bar

And now for the same one that does signing (replace "YourKeyPassword" with the passkey you used to generate your signing key):

del /y /q gvbb.zip
"c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" u -xr!*.bat -xr!*.zip -xr!.git* gvbb.zip *
set JAVA_HOME="c:\program files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\jre"
"c:\program files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\bbwp\bbwp" c:\users\eric\ripplesites\gv\gvbb.zip -o c:\temp\gvbb -gcsk YourKeyPassword -gp12 YourKeyPassword
"c:\program files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.2.0.5\bbwp\blackberry-tablet-sdk\bin\blackberry-deploy" -installApp -password blackberry -device 192.168.109.128 -package c:\temp\gvbb\gvbb.bar

MaKleSoft

It gets a lot easier if you add all the necessary binaries to your path and cd into your working directory. Then packaging and signing becomes as simple as:

bbwp yourarchive.zip -o ./ -gcsk YourKeyPassword -gp12 YourKeyPassword

ekdikeo

That is basically what this does, although you're certainly right about having it on your path -- however, by default it does not install it into your path, and if you have another already configured Java SDK that their tools are not compatible with, then you'll have some hoops to go through.

Moreso than just providing a long way to get there, I figured since I'd already done all the research to locate the command line parameters required, and Ripple seems quite fiddly (and doesn't work with the JAVA_HOME setting), I'd share that.

This also makes sure that you're starting with a fresh zip file, so that everything is for sure up to date as it would be in your app directory.

Anyway, hopefully someone finds it helpful :)

ekdikeo

Oh, just ran across this handy tool, as well:

http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Testing-and-Deployment/BlackBerry-Tablet-OS-Graphical-Aid/ta-p/1207067

.. getting my second app up and running was a matter of simply disabling my CSS Transitions, and it worked 100%. A little amazing.

rsanchez1

This is fantastic. Thanks for posting this. One thing though: what do you mean disabling CSS Transitions? It's not the -webkit-transforms used by scrolling lists, is it?

ekdikeo

No, I was using Morf to do a bunch of CSS animations in the app, as well as some other CSS animations without Morf, and they would -all- throw DOM Error 12s that would just totally screw up code that otherwise ran fine.

rsanchez1

Oh, that's good. I posted about the Playbook opportunity, and this will definitely help me get started.

ekdikeo

WebWorks works surprisingly well after having spent two or three weeks screwing with PhoneGap and all the stuff that's just weird on iOS and Android. On the XO media player, I seriously, just stripped out my CSS animations (boo), replaced a couple of PalmSystem calls with their blackberry equivalent, and the app ran at 100%. The only problem I've run into, which occurs both in their emulator and in the Ripple tool, is that I get a lot of components that receive click events doubly.

webOSdealer

Need a good replacement for webworks for this webOS call - kind: "PalmService", service: "palm://com.palm.connectionmanager/", method: "getStatus", onSuccess: "connectionStatusChange", subscribe: true},

rsanchez1

I would also like a good replacement for that on Chrome.