Maintaining their support for BlackBerry developers, the smartphone manufacturer now presents the BlackBerry Web Plug-in version 2.0 Beta1 editions of Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio web tools.
The Beta1 of the 2.0 version is persistent in supporting debugging and profiling web sites using the BlackBerry Browser. With this latest release, website debugging tasks on the BlackBerry Device Software version 5.0 can be performed. Interestingly, the innovative widget tools offer support for building BlackBerry Widget projects.
According to the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog, these these tools enable developers to create BlackBerry Widgets in more automated fashion as compared to the BlackBerry Widget SDK via the command line. The widget development procedure is further augmented with the start-up page that enables developers to initiate the development by means of a tool that offers connectivity to appropriate online resources, forums and content.
BlackBerry Web Plug-in for Eclipse as well as Microsoft Visual Studio are designed smartly so that when new versions of the BlackBerry Widget SDK are released, the updates can be accessed without updating Eclipse or Visual Studio tooling. The BlackBerry Web Plug-in Beta1 release is exclusively designed to automate the authoring, building and running of a BlackBerry Widget on a simulator.
The Beta1 release lacks official support for JavaScript breakpoint debugging of a BlackBerry Widget. However, it seems that the debugging functionality along with other productive features will be added soon.