BlackBerry 10 Ready for Devs with Free Alpha BlackBerry Jam

At BlackBerry World this week, RIM launched the new BlackBerry 10 Platform and released a developer toolkit for native and HTML5 software development.  The company is luring developers for when BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook launch with BlackBerry 10, later this year.

The toolkit  includes support for HTML5 application developers with the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK, allowing them to create native-like applications using common web programming technologies.

The BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK allows developers to use HTML5 and CSS for building apps and provides JavaScript bindings to native device APIs along with RIM’s open source UI toolkit, bbUI.js, to create applications with native-like capabilities. In this initial release of the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK, developers have access to a core subset of the full WebWorks APIs, including Identity, Application and App events, System and system events.

Applications created with any of the BlackBerry 10 tools will run on BlackBerry 10 smartphones as well as BlackBerry PlayBooktablets when the new platform becomes available for the PlayBook. All of the SDKs will be updated to give developers access to more of the BlackBerry 10 unique capabilities over the coming months.

The toolkit includes the BlackBerry 10 Native SDK with Cascades, which allows developers to create graphically rich, high performance native applications in C/C++ using Qt. The Native SDK for BlackBerry 10 has a rich set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that give developers access to core device features and a range of BlackBerry application services, such as Push and Payment services. Cascades is a powerful native application development toolset that allows developers to easily build visually stunning applications without having to write complex, low-level graphics code.

To further help developers get started on the BlackBerry 10 platform, BlackBerry 10 Jam attendees were given a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device. This testing unit is a further commitment from RIM to provide the developer community with the tools they need to build successful applications for BlackBerry 10 devices, so that they are ready when the first BlackBerry 10 devices are expected to launch in the latter part of 2012.

The NDK for BlackBerry 10, including Cascades, is available for download at http://developer.blackberry.com/native/download.

The BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK is available at http://developer.blackberry.com/html5/download.

 The toolkit is available in beta as a free download from http://developer.blackberry.com.