Blackberry: Important differences between WebWorks and Java Development

Question

I'm doing some research on blackberry development and I've been looking at the documents on the Blackberry website for both the Webworks development solution and Java based development. THey both seem to support important features such as

• Push
• Local Storage
• Geolocation

But I guess I'm missing why one would pick one method over the other. Are there key features missing from the Webworks side that are only available to native, javabased apps?

I'm hoping someone experienced with blackberry development can enlighten me.

Answer 1

WebWorks is a native Java app that runs a browser field in which your application runs.

We have developed both in native java and in WebWorks and are now planning on converting our WebWorks parts into native java... The reason being UI, like @hrnt mentioned, not only that the WebWorks UI looks different it also has some issues we were not able to resolve. To make a long story short, you do not have the same control over UI as much as you do with native Java. From the functionality perspective, in our WebWorks project we actually have a java library which is responsible for the logic and it is being called from the WebWorks (which is only responsible for UI), so there aren't that many limitations on that aspect.

Answer 2

WebWorks doesn't provide a UI library for building native looking BlackBerry applications. If you want your buttons to look like BlackBerry buttons, you need to implement it yourself. There was a third party Javascript library, but it was very much work in progress when I last checked.