Java Development

[mkirkup]

Although WES 2010 is just around the corner with a great line up of sessions in the Developer Trackwe have already started planning for what will be the best BlackBerry Developer Conference (September 27^th to 30^th) ever.

As part of the planning process, we are looking for feedback from the community on what topics and areas you would like covered at the conference this year.  Last year we had over 100 sessions for our attendees and are planning on a similar number again this year.  We want to ensure that those sessions cover everything you need to be successful on the BlackBerry platform from creating compelling user interfaces to integration with native applications and everything in between. 

We are asking for your feedback on topics now for two main reasons:

1. We want to ensure that we can create a conference that contains the most valuable content that you, the developer community, want to see at the event. 
2. Our “Call for Papers” from the community will open up in the next four to six weeks and your feedback will provide a great starting place for the many community members who want to speak at the conference.

I look forward to hearing all of your great ideas!

[dnepr]

BDC 09 was awesome.  

Hopefully Developer optimization challenge makes a comeback this year as well. Looking forward to some harder optimization problems (SimpleSortingIntVector, wink wink).   Was a very good experience participating in it last year.

Sessions on optimization, GUI, location based services, and communication are also very welcome.  

Top of my list personally... Eclipse plug in.   Maybe this will be the year when using it becomes more productive than Netbeans

[mreed]

Debugging and understanding non-intuitve GUI issues (i.e. layout problems / virtual extents on touch screen layouts / touch events not getting caught / etc...).

[DAquilina]

While it's highly unlikely I'll be able to make it down to California, this is definitely something I'm interested in. I like the idea of optimization workshops/challenges, as making a truly robust app that doesn't take up too many resources is a major problem for most up-and-coming developers.

[schepurny]

I would love to see a seminar on advanced debugging techniques using Eclipse and the simulators.

One of the main challenges that I seem to face is when I occasionally get an Exception that goes right through the debugger without being caught and it can be very time consuming to troubleshoot.

Some tips on making effective use of reading the logs would be good as well.

[APakka]

I have been to both dev conferences so far. Very information-rich and helpful. I go back to the materials I brought back with me almost on a weekly basis.

Creating multi-platform projects and development environments (say, spanning 4.5 to 5.0 OS) hasn't been well explained, yet almost everyone has to deal with it. Best practices will be very helpful, it took our team a lot of time to figure it out. Good thing there are open source projects too learn from. I am talking about #ifdef's (we avoid using them), libraries, what plays well with eJDE,  what is the best approach to deal with absence of Field.setBackground() on 4.5 OS etc. In general I have a feeling that conferences are very focused on the latest stuff (and they should, RIM always has quite a bit to show) but there are still way too many devices with older OS versions that will have to be supported, so a perspective on "getting the best out of every device with as much common code as possible" would be very welcomed.

Also, many shops would want to allow to re-brand or skin their applications by third parties without compromising the code integrity. Currently there are very limited options and a session on it would be interesting.

[JCarty]

Discussion of existing/new/future APIs to take advantage of. While the java docs (and some of the PDF guides) provide you with small snippets, none of them truely tell you what they do without playing around with them a bit.

Definitely some talk on future APIs so we can suggest new ones which would minimize on "This is not possible" discussion.

[dpreussler]

I really appreciated last years "hidden gems" session or Cassidy's session about integration with native apps, both where full with tons of infos on every slide. More of that

[peter_strange]

I'll come up with more sensible suggestions at some stage, but one thing I did discuss with various other developers at BDC 09 was a whisky tasting session.  I remember the discussion, not a clue who I was discussing it with, which I hope is reflection on the stage in the evening and not my failing mental faculties.  Anyway, I'm happy to bring a few Scottish single malts to get the ball rolling.... 

[johnbibs]

I would like to suggest the following:

- An in depth discussion on the BrowserField API

- Debugging and utilizing profiling tools in the JDE.