At the ongoing BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011 in San Francisco, the company disclosed its next generation mobile platform, the BlackBerry BBX. It has been engineered with the various functionalities of the QNX platform to connect people, devices, content and services.
The next generation platform for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, BBX, is said to enable powerful real-time mobile experiences. It will include BBX-OS and incorporate support for BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for HTML5 as well as native developers.
This mobile platform will also be lending support to those apps that have been developed with the tools available for the BlackBerry PlayBook such as Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5. Besides these components, it is set to support the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps on future BBX-based tablets and smartphones.
BBX will come incorporated with the new BlackBerry Cascades UI framework for advanced graphics and bringubg ‘Super App’ capabilities to enable various enhanced abilities like deep integration between apps, always-on Push services and the BBM social platform, among many others.
RIM also announced BlackBerry WebWorks which offers support for apps built on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Developers can now monetize apps on both kinds of smartphones, those running on BlackBerry 6 as well as BlackBerry 7 with the new WebWorks. The BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.2 is now available along with updates for the new PlayBook OS SDK and PlayBook Simulator.
The Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook 1.0 gold release was also thrown open by RIM apart from the BlackBerry BBX platform.