QuickStartGuide - Familiar Foundations (the bada orange presentation) Videos

The following videos are an edited version of the “bada: Familiar Foundations” presentation from the recent bada Orange Partner developer event held at Orange Labs in London. In this presentation we introduced some of the standard technologies that bada is built upon and showed how your knowledge from other platforms can be used to give you a head start when developing for bada. We paid particular attention to discussing the similarities and differences between bada and Symbian, but the material presented here should be a useful bada primer, no matter which platforms you are familiar with.

QuickStartGuide - Standard technologies

bada supports a number of standard technologies, which helps to make the job of moving your code from another platform, such as Symbian C++ or Qt, easier. In terms of graphics technologies, bada supports both the Open GL ES 1.1 and 2.0 libraries (although not all bada devices will have the hardware to support this).

QuickStartGuide - Alternatives to C++

Using C++ on its own is not the only way of developing bada applications, you can create applications using a mixture of C++ APIs and web (Javascript, WAC, HMTL5) and Flash technologies. Skeleton versions of both these application types can be created easily using the application wizard in the bada IDE.

The web application wizard allows developers to create applications using a mixture of HTML, CSS and Javascript. The bada C++ code to create the web control and launch an HTML file is automatically created for you. The web control loads an HTML file called index.html, which in turn uses the Javascript file main.js. Default versions of these files are generated for you and you can then add your own HTML and Javascript to build the web application.

QuickStartGuide - Everything is asynchronous

Another area that bada is similar to Symbian - and indeed any other modern smartphone platform - is the way that it deals with asynchronous requests. In bada, almost any request, whether waiting for a response to an HTTP request, retrieving location information or getting information from one of the built in sensors, is dealt with asynchronously. In Symbian C++, asynchronous requests are wrapped up in ActiveObjects and managed by the ActiveScheduler object, which invokes the RunL() method of the appropriate ActiveObject when a response is received to an asynchronous request. This provides a form of co-operative multi-tasking within a single application thread.

QuickStartGuide - The bada APIs: finding similarities

The bada C++ APIs are divided into 21 (in bada SDK 1.2) top level namespaces, divided neatly according to functionality. So, you’ll find the base namespace which contains numeric types and standard classes such as DateTime and String and the base::collections subnamespace that contains a comprehensive set of classes to implement arrays, linked lists, stacks and queues. Other namespaces include those for locations, multimedia features, handling sensors and the user interface, all organised in a logical way which makes getting to grips with the bada APIs a lot easier.

QuickStartGuide - bada: familiar foundations

Welcome to the second part of our QuickStart guide to bada programming. In the first article in the series we looked at the bada development environment, showed your where to find resources to assist your development efforts and demonstrated how easy it is to build a simple application. Now it’s time to look at bada in more detail and to talk about some of the key technologies that bada is built on.

For those with a background in Symbian development, whether you’ve been developing apps using Symbian C++ or Qt , you’ll find that a reassuring amount of your accumulated knowledge can be applied to bada. We won’t be attempting a feature by feature comparison, since many of the idiosyncrasies of Symbian C++ are unique to the platform, instead we’ll be concentrating on those Symbian development concepts which can also be applied to bada: the familiar foundations. If you’re moving from another platform, this article is for you too.

Need to get up to speed with bada?

Well, you've come to the right place! Whether a hobbyist or professional software developer, choosing your mobile platform is a big commitment, so we'd like to try and make it as easy as possible. In addition to our existing "beginners guide" I've also lined up this handy 4 part video series covering an introduction to the bada platform, an introduction to the funky bada brand, the amazing first bada phone (the super sexual S8500 or Wave) and the highly useful Remote Test Lab - all you could need (with the SDK) to get up and running in no time! So lean back, turn your phone face down and get up to speed with bada!



The rest of the video series can be found here and there is plenty of other helpful documentation to be found at developer.bada.com or in the SDK.

As they say in the movies, thanks for watching!

QuickStartGuide - Resources

We’ll explain more about what bada can do and what makes bada different in future blog posts, but for now we’ll list a few resources that should help you get started. The SDK comes with an extensive help system which you can open from the IDE by choosing Help|Help Contents. This gives extensive API documentation and lots more.

On developer.bada.com you’ll find a Blogs and Lectures section, within which you’ll find videos which provide detailed introductions to bada features such as Security, Maps and Locations and Messaging with  more coming soon. 

QuickStartGuide - Your first bada application

When you’ve spent enough time looking through the sample code, it’s time to build your first bada application. Choose File|New|bada application project and the type of project to create- we’ll build a form based application and call it MybadaSample. Now click the Finish button and the application skeleton will be created and added to your workspace. Clicking Next will lead you through a series of options to customise the project, such as the class name for the default form created. For now we’ll stick to the defaults and our form will just be called Form1.

Building a form based application

Of the other types of applications listed, web applications are a mixture of HTML,CSS and Javascript while Flash applications are created using a specified .SWF file, built using Flash Lite 3.1 and ActionScript 2.0. Handy for moving those Flash based games across to bada.

QuickStartGuide - Building the examples

The second part of our Quick guide to bada development looks at the examples you can use to get up to speed with bada. When the installation is finished and the IDE is launched, you’ll see the bada SDK welcome screen. This provides you with links to developer documentation and the API reference, but for now we’ll just close the welcome screen and move directly to building some of the bada examples which you can see in the window to the right of your workspace.

Quick start guide to bada development

If you’re new to bada development, either moving your app from Symbian, or just excited by the new features coming in bada 2.0, we’d like to welcome you with our ‘Quick guide to bada development’. There’s no marketing and no tag-lines, it’s a strictly just the facts series of blog posts, which offer a quick introduction to the bada IDE and all the development resources that are at your fingertips.

Let’s dive right in and start with an introduction to the bada IDE and show you how easy it is to build a simple application skeleton and start coding.