RIM Eclipses development ease

Research in Motion (RIM) has announced a new development platform for the Blackberry smartphone range.

There's a new Java plug-in (1.1) for Eclipse that provides a complete development, debug and simulation environment supporting multiple devices and operating system versions, which can be switched without restarting the system.

There's also a new Java SDK (v5) with now over 20,000 API calls including Location Based Services APIs enabling cell-site geolocation, GPS, geocoding and reverse geocoding to obtain address and location data, OpenGL ES support for 3D graphics, touchscreen and accelerometer, new pre-built UI components, file pickers and screen transitions and SQLite support for data sharing across different applications.

The other new release is Web Plug-In v2.0 which allows developing Blackberry widgets using standard web tools such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX.

Blackerries are notoriously hard to develop for, hopefully these new tools will make life easier for developers.

More can be found from RIM's developer site.