What Makes a BlackBerry Application

You should now be familiar with the basics of building a BlackBerry application using the stand-alone JDE or the JDE Plug-in for Eclipse. Before really diving into what the BlackBerry API can do, we’ll digress briefly to discuss a few concepts that apply to BlackBerry application development. If you’re eager to get coding, you can skip to the next chapter, but I recommend you at least skim over this one first, so you know what’s discussed here and can refer to it later as necessary. We’ll cover some fundamental things that will be used heavily in the next couple of chapters, including the user interface threading model and the BlackBerry API Javadocs. We’ll also cover a few things that are useful to know in many types of applications, like application life cycle, foreground and background applications, and the different types of BlackBerry projects you can create using the development environment.