Berrysoft Developer

After more fully investigating available distributed source control management (SCM) systems, Berrysoft has decided to adopt Mercurial.

Developing professional, reliable, maintainable Blackberry software takes more than a compiler.  SCM systems are used by developers to maintain control of the various versions of software created during developement, and allow parallel development of different “branches”.  This allows us to do things like maintain a “stable” branch, while simultaneously developing in a “new feature” branch, as well as a “revision-fix” branch, pulling any bug fixes into the stable branch as they are discovered and fixed.

We are very excited about this software, and the capabilities it gives us now.  We have spent an entire week deciding on our production process, and playing with the new tool.  Mercurial is going to make development a lot more fun, and will benefit our customers as well!

Well, we did it.  We bit the bullet and dropped using the RIM JDE in favor of the much more modern and newly released Eclipse Ganymede!  As we gear up for the release of software products, proper source and build control is a must.  For source control, we are using Darcs, but the RIM JDE provided us no alternative but to move to another IDE.  As it happened, the newest version of Eclipse was just released, and so our timing could not be better.  If you are a developer thinking of doing this move, we highly recommend it, and you can find more information on professional setup of Ganymede on our Wiki.  We chose Ganymede so we could use Apache’s Ant, and the Blackberry Ant Tools to give us complete build control.  Being a Visual Studio shop, we weren’t expecting much, but have been extremely impressed with Ganymede so far.

Well, it’s been a long couple of weeks.  In addition to getting all of the web sites up, we had to setup our backend servers as well for things like our CRM (customer relationship management) software, and PM (project management).

We still have not made a final decision on our shopping cart software, and are now evaluating X-Cart and some others recommended to us by Google.  We are going with the Google Checkout gateway, and want something which will work seamlessly with it.  So, our store may change completely!

We finally settled on using Darcs for our source control software because it is distributed, modern, and very easy to use (unlike CVS or SubVersion).  Darcs is fantastic, and will allow us to maintain professional versioning control on our builds, and branchs of those builds, while also allowing us to have a secure backup of our IP which is continuously professionally backed up on a remote server.  So, even if our building were to burn to the ground, we wouldn’t lose a thing.

You will find our Support Desk up and running, but it will eventually have some customizations done to it.  In particular, we’ll be adding in a Skype button so you’ll be able to talk to us live when we are available or by appointment, should we feel this will help us more quickly resolve a support issue.

All of this infrastructure is designed to give us the ability to quickly and professional provide the full range of services needed by our customers, while keeping our costs down.  This allows us to spend more time developing the next great Blackberry program.

Some time next month, we should have all this finalized, and perhaps be releasing our first product!

As Berrysoft Stuidos prepares for it’s first software release for the Blackberry, I hope to take the time periodically to share my experience as a Blackberry user and developer with in depth articles for both power users and programmers.  Like many of you, we are still learning, but want to share what we have discovered with those who may be new to the Berry, or just not have the kind of time required to figure things out themselves.  You will also be able to find information (as we add it) in our Wiki.

If you are a developer, like us you have probably had to teach yourself the Blackberry API.  We plan to share some of what we have discovered to help those just starting out trying to develop for the Blackberry.  If you are actively developing for the Blackberry, please join our developer forums, and contact me for access to our Developer Wiki.

Being a spoiled Visual Studio programmer, with Visual Assist X, I’ve had to deal with the primitive Blackberry JDE that can’t even automatically update it’s own .jad file!  So, Im in the process of getting us setup with Eclipse and Ant Tools.  Hopefully, this will eliminate some headaches for us, but right now we are really focused on staying on schedule getting the Berrysoft web site and backend up and running while we finish off our pending release.

Stay tuned for the latest!