Here’s my experience using the Ripple emulator for BlackBerry WebWorks.
There’s a bunch of awesome BlackBerry developers at the hackathon, but I’m determined to work this out without them walking me through it. After all, developers don’t normally have the opportunity to ask directly for help. And this way I get to discover all the dark corners of the BlackBerry developer experience.
Again, Ripple comes as a non-native installer. This time, the installation goes into /Applications/Research in Motion/ – I would prefer to have everything in /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/ so everything is in one consistent place. Or, since Ripple is an emulator for more than just WebWorks, just leave it in /Applications but drop the “Research in Motion” folder. And tidy up the app so the resources are all inside the app bundle. Basically, follow Mac best practice.
Launching the Ripple emulator application the first time results in a prompt in the middle of the screen, asking what platform you want to emulate:
Selecting “WebWorks” results in a a huge emulator window with the device running off the bottom of the screen – this on my Macbook Pro running at 1680×1050. Are mobile screens really so big?
In discussion with some folks at the hackathon, it turns out the Windows version of Ripple has the option to scale the UI, but not in the Mac version.
I’ve got my packaged app from the previous exploration of creating a WebWorks app, but there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to load it into the emulator.
Reading “Packaging your app with the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK” tells me about the different formats of files I discovered when creating my own app:
- .cod file for wireless distribution or distribution from a web page
- .alx file for distribution using BlackBerry Desktop Manager
- .jad file for distribution from a web page
- .cso file for application signing
- .csl file for application signing
Apparently there’s also a .bar file for a BlackBerry tablet. I can’t help but feel I’d like a single fat package for all eventualities.
There’s instructions on running your application on a smartphone simulator, but the simulator is a VM and does not appear to be the Ripple emulator.
Reading Packaging your app in Ripple, you can package from within the emulator. You have to click the tiny wrench icon in the top-right corner of the emulator window. This should be much more prominent if this is a common task.
Unfortunately, clicking on the wrench prompts me for lots of configuration: SDK path, Project Root, archive name … all as text fields, and not file/folder pickers. There’s also no support for tab-completion of paths in the fields, so you’ll have to enter them long-hand:
Given RIM only recently acquired Ripple, I’ll cut them some slack. But I’d like to see for example a wrapper script that launches Ripple with all the correct configurations for SDK, project, etc.
The settings for smartphones are on the packaging page.
I’m guessing that my settings should be:
- SDK Path: /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9
- Project Root: /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/UIExamples
- Archive Name: UIExamples
- Output Folder: /tmp/Ripple
Trying with these settings, I got the familiar config.xml not found error:
Tweaking the settings,
- SDK Path: /Developer/SDKs/Research In Motion/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.3.0.9
- Project Root: /Users/savs/Downloads/blackberry-WebWorks-Samples-0a5693e/ProjectRoot
- Archive Name: UIExamples
- Output Folder: /tmp/Ripple
That worked:
I ended up with UIExamples.zip inside /tmp/Ripple, and an “OTAInstall” folder and a “StandardInstall” folder.
The OTAInstall folder contains UIExamples .cod files, split into ten separate packages:
Apparently this is for backwards-compatibility reasons, with only packages of ~60k or less being allowed for an OTA install. This means that, when you deploy to a phone, you get to watch 10 different packages being installed before your app is ready for testing. Ouch.
Now I’ve build the packages, it’s not clear how to actually use the built application. The “Package and Launch” menu option is greyed-out.
Looking at the settings screen again, at the bottom beside Simulator it says “No simulators found 
“.
During the hackathon, the network failed. This results in some fairly unhelpful problems with Ripple, where you’ll see a blank loading screen for a long time followed by an error message:
This all went away when the network came back.
Reading the docs suggests another way to view your app in Ripple is to stick it on a web server and point Ripple at that. If you’ve got a local server, the benefit is a much quicker development cycle, without having to go through the packaging process first. Indeed, this did work and allowed me to see my app:
The downside on a Mac is that you can’t easily symlink your content from the web root to your development location (at least, not without making a ton of parent directories more widely accessible). See Creating a symbolic link in Sites directory on StackOverflow for more details.
Anyway, success of sorts: I got my app packaged, and I got to view the development files via HTTP.
Next up: signing.