Environment setup

Having previously developed apps on the Android platform, I had an idea of the general steps that would be involved in learning to develop for BB.  The first step is to set up your environment so that you can start learning/writing code for BB (obviously before this you need to have an updated jdk on your computer).  There is a BB plug-in for Eclipse which can be found here.  There are two options for installing this plug-in. You can install it directly into your current eclipse environment via the update site or you can download a full installer.  This full installer will install eclipse and the BlackBerry plug-in .  Long story short, using the update site did not work out for me so I ended up using the full installer.

The other tool I needed to download was a simulator to run BB apps on.  BB provides a wide variety of simulators.  You can choose the model, OS, and carrier for the simulator you want.  I ended up downloading a simulator for the Curve which I will use for testing for now as I'm not sure which phone model we are targeting.  BB simulators can be found here.

Finally, I have been following this guide in learning how to set up my environment and for beginning to write apps.