Yesterday the launcher we developed for blackberry.pocket.at was approved for the BlackBerry App World and it is now available for free download via this App World link.

A launcher like this provides an easy to use entry point for users interested in the news provided by blackberry.pocket.at. Additionally BlackBerry users browsing the BlackBerry App World will eventually find the launcher in the News & Information section which will generate new visitors for blackberry.pocket.at.

If you own a web site providing content and information and you want to provide it in an optimized way to BlackBerry users feel free to contact us!

Don’t miss the troii team interview, talking with BlackBerry App Reviews about our time tracking application timr.

With the BlackBerry developer conference RIM held last week in San Francisco they showed that they are really trying to improve their already great platform. First they created a perfect system to push email to mobile devices in an optimized format that allows viewing large attachments without having to download the whole file. Then the transformed their devices from things that looked like calculators to good looking, modern smart phones with rich media features.

There are only two important things in which some competitors are better: the mobile browsing experience and the available third party applications. One of those two things should be solved within the next year when RIM will bring a Webkit based browser to their devices. Unlike other Webkit based browser on other smartphones (like the iPhone for example) the BlackBerry devices will soon be able to play flash application and movies too.

For solving the problem of getting more applications to their customers RIM is doing two things: the first one is to preinstall their App World on all devices running OS 5 – which are all new devices coming within these weeks. The second one is to get more developers to write applications.

To get more developers writing applications the BlackBerry OS 5 will offer some very cool new features that are available via the API and a new set of development tools was created.

As a developer writing BlackBerry applications in Java now for nearly two years I am glad to see the improvements they made. Starting with their JDE was a real pain. Being used to Eclipse it was hard to write code in a thing like that. I was an early adopter of the Eclipse plugin the provided in different versions last year. Although it was nice to write my applications within the Eclipse editor there were some issues with building the application and deploying it to the simulator (especially if the application had alternate entry points).

At the developer conference RIM presented the new version 1.1 of their Eclipse plugin which is available as a Beta version already. They said that they rewrote the whole plugin and my first tests looked very promising. An import operation allows importing legacy projects that are converted to the new layout. It is possible to make code changes without having to restart the simulator. The only drawback at the moment is that there is only an OS 5 component available and it is not possible to create legacy OS versions. I hope they provide the necessary components soon.

It is interesting that after RIM made their Desktop Manager available for Mac OS a few weeks ago they also announced that their development tools will be available for Mac OS too. Currently the compiler and simulator only works under Windows operating systems.

Another great improvement for developing BlackBerry applications will be the cell based location service that RIM will make available through their API. We are using GPS locations services at the moment for our product timr and we will add the cell based location service as soon as possible because it will our users allow to get current position faster and in a less power consuming way.

All in all we at troii are very much looking forward to make use of all these great now things RIM showed at the developer conference and we cannot wait to get next generation of devices for our daily use.

Within the last days we brought systems around our software development process to a whole new level.

Since the last years we were using various open source tools for different tasks company. For bug/issues tracking we used bugzilla for many projects and trac for the development of our time tracking system timr. The nice thing about trac was the integrated wiki which was used for documentation. We additionally ran a media wiki instance for storing company internal documents.

Two weeks ago a tweed of Michael Plöd made me aware of the new starter license model of Atlassian. They are now selling their products with 10$ licenses for startups with up to ten users. This was perfect for the size of our team. So we bought the whole set:

• JIRA – issue tracking
• Confluence – Wiki system
• crowd – user management and single sign on
• fisheye – source code explorer
• bamboo – continuous integration server
• greenhoper – JIRA plugin for agile software development

The whole install process is covered in a guide named the Atlassian Dragon Quest where every level of the quest relates to installing on of the products. It took about two days to install all of the components and to integrate them with each other but the effort was definitely worth it.

We decided to not follow the guide in two things:

- we used our existing MySQL server instead of the recommended PostgreSQL
- we wanted to install the applications as WAR files into our existing Tomcat server

Using MySQL instead of PostgreSQL was no problem at all. We just created databases and corresponding users for all the products and configured them in the setup wizards.

Unfortunately not all the products are available for WAR/EAR installation. Fisheye has to run as a separate instance in its own Java VM. Additionally we ran into a kind of dead lock when we tried to connect JIRA and bamboo as described in the setup guide when they were running in the same tomcat instance. The JIRA bamboo plugin tries to contact bamboo on startup and gets no response because the tomcat is not started.

After all the new systems were running we started to migrate the old content. We were very happy about the mechanism JIRA provides for importing bugzilla issues. Everything we had to do was to define the MySQL database connection and to answer some questions of the import wizard.

Getting the tickets from trac into JIRA was a bit more difficult because we were using MySQL for trac too instead of sqlite. We had to adapt the perl scripts of trac-to-jira-migrate for using the MySQL database.

Thanks to the Universal Wiki Converter importing the content from media wiki and trac worked like a charm.

The last setup step we made was to use crowd as authentication service for apache and subversion. Therefor we installed
the Crowd Apache Connector and followed the detailed descriptions in the crowd documentation.

Stay tuned for some experience reports which will follow.

Wir freuen uns über einen Bericht zu timr und troii in der ORF Futurezone. Den Artikel findet man hier.

Besuchen Sie uns auf der Messe Braunau von 18.09.09-20.09.09 jeweils von 10:00 bis 18:00 Uhr.

Sie finden uns zusammen mit unseren Innsoft Kooperationspartnern in der Halle 3 Stand 1.

Außerdem würden wir uns freuen Sie zu unserem “Come Together” mit Buffet und Getränken am Freitag 18.09. ab 18 Uhr bei unserem Messestand begrüßen zu dürfen.

Wir freuen uns auf Ihren Besuch und interessante Gespräche!

We are happy to announce that troii Software is now a proud member of the BlackBerry Alliance Program. This allows us to bring an even better BlackBerry experience to our customers when creating individual BlackBerry enterprise applications for them.

It also allows us to add the BIS-B connection option to timr, our time tracking application, which make connecting to our server easy and independent from the mobile carriers around the world.

Being able to test our software on all the new BlackBerry devices is another benefit of the program that does not just make us as happy. So get ready for finding our applications in the BlackBerry Solutions Catalog and the BlackBerry App World in the future.

troii does Java and .NET Software development and Consulting. We like both “worlds” but in our opinion, one of the main drawbacks of .NET, compared to Java, is the lack of good OpenSource frameworks and projects. There are so many projects that start and after a few months they fall asleep.

In this post we’d like to tell you about a really great OpenSource .NET project called NCalc.

Last month I needed an attributed grammar for custom mathematical evaluations and started some web research to find existing projects. I came up with COCO /R and ANTLR. Both are free parser generators and can be used for C++, Java and C#. Even if COCO /R is from the University of Linz, not far away from us, I decided to use ANTLR due to the more powerful community behind it.

What we needed was a mathematical expression evaluator which calculates dynamic expressions like (2 + 5) * 3. Another requirement to the grammar was that it had to support functions like GetValue("objectName", "valueName") which does a query to get a value from an proprietary object cloud. So we needed something that evaluates an expression like GetValue("car", "throttle") * 3.

I was already designing the grammar when I found this article on CodeProject. It describes and solves exactly what I was looking for. The article is excellent and it seems that the author, Sebastien Ros, decided to provide the complete solution now as NCalc on CodePlex.

NCalc is extremly flexibly. It allows us to use functions and parameters out of the box. E.g. if we have to use a lot of GetValue("car", "throttle") functions we can create a parameter to substitute this function with a parameter. Now we can use the throttle value much easier in our expressions by (THROTTLE * 3) + (THROTTLE * 2).

Peter Mitterhauser, who created our corporate design and our logo put us in his online portfolio – check it out under http://www.bigrobotape.com/

You have to scroll a bit to right, we are currently in position six because the project was finished in January.

Lately we got a lot of spam because we bought the domain timr.com for our product and it seems like the previous owner has not been very carefully with his email address. Spam is annoying but it is even more annoying if you get it pushed to your BlackBerry. So I tried to find the best solution for adding a spam filter to our mail server.

We are using a Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 on an Windows Small Business Server 2003 because in our opinion this is one of the best solution available in combination with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. I have a lot of experience with Linux mail servers because I run my personal mail on a Debian system with IMAP, spamassassin, greylisting and maildrop for years now. This combination removes nearly every spam mail from my email so I was looking for combining it with our company mail system.

Though there are attempts to install spamassassin on Windows and to combine it with Exchange we were not quite happy with that solution. I was already thinking about subscribing to some service like Spam Stops Here. Using these services means changing the MX DNS entry of your domain to send all emails through their server which forwards them afterwards to your mail server.

This inspired me to create our own dedicated mail filtering server. I set up a Ubuntu 9.04 machine inside a VMWare Virtual Server instance on our Windows machine and configured it like my personal mail server without the IMAP server. Instead I used the how to from knownplace to forward the filtered mail to our Exchange server. After changing the MX entry of our domains to point to the new Linux mail server the amount of spam mails dropped drastically.