Well share some love/code man!

I too loved the MDS Suite and developed a bunch of internal stuff. Never understood what RIM was thinking when they decided to kill it.

I hope you will continue to blog about your experience in this area.

Eric

Darren's going to be doing a live walkthrough of this in Designer at the Chattanooga Lotus User Group 5/4. If anyone wants to see it, register at { http://www.simplified-tech.com/events }

See you there!

@1, Back in the day I presented a session on MDS Studio at the 2008 BlackBerry DevCon......doh!

@2, I see no reason why it wouldn't or shouldn't. And I think you mean 4.1.6 ;)

Keen to see if there are any other plans for replacing MDS studio for writing local apps. From memory the BlackBerry site is still mentioning MDS studio.

I liked it too - had some limitations but the product could have really developed into something.

They are replacing it with the new web development tooling that was forever in beta. I believe it has just hit gold (and to make matters worse is now two products) here http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/browserdev/eclipseplugin.jsp and http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/browserdev/widgetsdk.jsp. It looks like the latter is the successor to MDS Studio.

I'm glad to see IBM are NOT waiting on RIM to have XPages support on device, that would have been a complete cluster. And RIM are not exactly on the ball with due dates and the like. Steve Casteldine and Niklas Heidloff's OpenNTF "XPages Mobile Controls" project looks very promising. Multi device too....yum, http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectLookup/XPages+Mobile+Controls

Darren and I were discussing this today, and I wanted to pass along the gist of the discussion.

I think part of the reason Darren was successful with this is that he's been doing BlackBerry development for some time, and so is intuitively aware of some of the issues with the browser. Because of this background, he coded around them without really thinking about it.

For someone with a straight Lotus development background, these issues and the related work arounds would not be obvious.

If there is enough interest, we could put together a class and teach it over weekly webinars. Would your organizations be willing to invest about $899 per person if we put the training together?

As Lisa mentioned above, I unconsciously avoided using ANY Ajax calls in the code based on a long and arduous experience with BlackBerry development. This avoidance of partial (or full) page refreshes in XPages avoided many of the pitfalls that others may have hit.

Long story short, if you have the above software specs, and DO NOT use partial page updates, your should be fine.

@8 - You never know - how much other interest did you get?