RIM pushing WebWorks for phone, PlayBook development

05.02.2011
Research In Motion's BlackBerry WebWorks Application Platform lets developers use standard Web tools to create applications that work like native programs on RIM's smartphones and PlayBook tablets, company officials said Thursday.

WebWorks, a rebranded version of the BlackBerry Widgets development platform that now uses the WebKit Web rendering engine, . On Thursday, RIM returned to San Francisco to give more details about WebWorks, which has been made open source and is available through the open-source development site GitHub. WebWorks is RIM's first application environment for both smartphones and the PlayBook tablet, which is scheduled to go on sale by the end of March. A beta version of the WebWorks SDK (Software Development Kit) for Tablet OS was introduced last month.

RIM rebranded Widgets to emphasize that it can be used to create entire applications instead of just the small on-screen tools usually associated with widget platforms, said Christopher Smith, senior director of research and development for the BlackBerry Development Platform.

"A WebWorks application is a complete application. It has full access to all the native methods on the device. All of the data, all of the services," Smith said. All the security tools and policies on the BlackBerry platform also apply to that app, he said.

"Under the hood, we are actually wrapping the Web engine in a native container," Smith said. For BlackBerry smartphones, that wrapper is Java, and for the upcoming PlayBook, it is based on Adobe Flash and Air, he said.

With WebWorks, developers can program in HTML5, CSS and JavaScript and create applications that are far richer than typical Web-based offerings, said Jeff Jackson, senior vice president of software at RIM. It's hard to tell the difference between Web and native applications based on appearance or capability, Jackson said. At the event, RIM demonstrated multimedia applications on the PlayBook that were written with the standard Web tools, such as an animation program written entirely in CSS.