BlackBerry 10 Native SDK Beta 2 for BlackBerry 10 now available
BlackBerry® 10 Native SDK Beta 2 introduces new functionality to both the Native APIs and IDE.
At the C API layer, they have introduced some important new functionality such as the Invocation Framework API, NFC, Geocoding, Cryptography, Audio Manager, Slogger2 and Notifications Manager.
Invocation
The invocation framework enables the delivery of invocations between end points. It describes how end points can be addressed, and provides a mechanism for registering and brokering event handlers such that invocation sources may be loosely coupled to the handler. The invocation framework provides an advanced brokering scheme that allows it to address many different service scenarios, and also to easily be extended to cover new cases.
Your app can register as either a source or a handler. A good example of a source app is an app that supports nested URI’s, and requires a URI handler to handle the URI request. Your app can leverage the invocation framework to broker and determine the best handler for this URI – the assumption here is that there are handlers registered for this on the system. Alternatively you can develop an app that registers as an invocation target – for example, an NFC handler that registers interest in certain NDEF tags. When the NFC service reads a tag, it will leverage the invocation framework to find the best fit handler for that tag and invoke your app. We also support the Invoke API at the Qt layer, so if you are developing a Cascades™-based app, you may want to use the Qt-based invoke API as opposed to the C-based API.
There is also built-in support for invoking the Cascades Action Bar and Context Menu. This support is now integrated in the Cascades UI Framework. Please refer to the following Knowledge Base article for details on some known issues which will be addressed in an upcoming patch
NFC
NFC (Near Field Communications) is a short range protocol that is used for contactless communication between devices and tags. Our NFC API will support multiple NFC use cases such as Bluetooth®/Wi-Fi® pairing, NFC contact exchange, reading and writing tags, contactless payment and so on. The possibilities here are endless and I look forward to some really innovative NFC apps for BlackBerry 10 smartphones.
Cryptography
If you care about cryptography, you are in luck as we now expose our Certicom APIs for encryption and decryption of data streams. They provide a whole slew of symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms such as AES, DES, RSA, ECIES and many more. Along with this, we provide various algorithms for key agreement and transport such as DH, ECDH, ECMQV, RSA, a variety of digital signatures, numerous SHA, MD and HMAC hash functions and random number generation.
Audio Manager
For developers working on apps with audio content, we have introduced a new audio manager API that provides audio concurrency services. The audio manager allows you to choose which microphone and speaker to use. It also provides APIs to get information about different microphones and speakers so if you need that degree of control this API should provide what you need.
Native SDK Logging with slogger2
With slogger2, the most important thing that you gain as a developer is speed. Slogger2 will have minimal system overhead and will be several times faster than the original slogger. Slogger2 will also log when interrupts are disabled, which might be of use to those hardcore low-level developers who require this type of capability. The slogger2 APIs will happily co-exist alongside the legacy slogger.
Notifications Manager
Some apps may want to send notifications to the user – for example, say an app that communicates with the cloud wants to inform the user when new data has been uploaded. The app can register with the notification service to send such a notification. We support simple LED notifications, sound and vibration, toast messages, dialogs, and Inbox notifications. Apps that want to leverage this service need to indicate this by specifying the post_notification action in their bar descriptor. The user will have the ability to customise the notification through the notification settings dialog.
Cascades Platform (C++) APIs
On the C++/Qt side of things, we’ve introduced a whole set of new APIs such as invocation API, Barcode processing, vibration control, copy and paste, and video capture (plus I already described the invoke API earlier). The C++ invoke API is similar in scope to the C layer API and is geared towards folks writing Cascades apps who would naturally be working with the Qt paradigm and would benefit from a Qt API.
Barcode Processing
Barcode Processing is a new API that was developed for encoding and decoding QR codes. While we’ve made the basic encoding and decoding functionality available to non -Cascades apps, the real interesting use cases would occur in conjunction with Cascades apps. The barcode-extended APIs in the Cascades namespace that will allow apps to create and display a barcode scanning control, which will in turn trigger the camera API to show a viewfinder surface as a Cascades foreign window. The app can then scan the QR code and use the provided APIs to encode it as a string and display it on screen.
In addition to this, you will also have APIs that allow your app to customize properties of the Viewfinder surface such as size and location.
Video and Camera
Speaking of camera, we now provide APIs to control camera settings and capture pictures within an application. This allows you to develop apps that interact with the camera, as well as ones that programmatically request a still image from the camera and start a video stream recording.
Location
For developers creating location-based apps, we have added a subset of the QtMobility location APIs. We have introduced APIs for querying current location such as latitude, longitude and altitude. .
Vibration Control and Clipboard
Last but not least, we provide a C++ API for vibration control and a clipboard API, both of which are similar in scope to the C layer APIs we already provide. There have also been a myriad number of bug fixes, enhancements to existing APIs and optimizations, which are too many to list in this blog. The best way to explore all these changes is by downloading the NDK and taking a look at the headers, documentation and samples.
Tooling
On the tooling front, we’ve introduced some neat features such as invocation framework tooling, an option for faster bar deployment time, and pretty printing of objects in the debugger. More importantly, we also allow you to specify multiple icons and splash screens in your bar file. This is important for when we start releasing new devices based on the BlackBerry 10 platform, such as the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. To make it as easy as possible for you, Beta 2 of our IDE will allow you to package multiple icons and splash screens in your bar so that the bar can be deployed on multiple targets.
Source: BlackBerry DevBlog
