Introduction. Overview of the Book

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1 Introduction This book is for developers. It will get you up and running with your first bada app, quickly. Looking beyond your first app, we hope this book will find a permanent place on your desk as a bada companion, with its overviews of the platform, the bada architecture, bada namespaces, application programming interfaces (APIs), and services and above all with its recipes. These have been written by Samsung s bada development team to give you more than 45 bestpractice examples of common bada APIs in use. You can learn from this code, and you can reuse this code. As for the goal of this book, we hope it s clear to introduce you to bada, and to make it as easy as possible to develop cool apps for bada phones. Overview of the Book Developing for mobile is never trivial, whatever the platform. In Part 1 of the book, Chapter 1 runs through the issues that can bite you in mobile development. If you are a seasoned mobile developer, you may know the issues already. However, the boom in mobile app development has brought thousands of new developers into what used to be a niche market. If you are not one of those grizzled types who cut their baby teeth on embedded, eating ARM 1 assembler for breakfast way back at the dawn of mobile, then this could be for you. Understanding the mobile difference, and becoming comfortable with it, is the essential starting point for doing mobile development. And if it helps, Chapter 1 also summarises some agile best-practice. Rules are good for breaking, as well as following, but in either case it s good to know what they are. 1 The ARM RISC processor architecture, from UK company ARM Ltd, is overwhelmingly the most popular CPU choice for mobile hardware. 1

2 2 Introduction Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 show you just how easy it is to get started with bada, introducing the Eclipse-based development environment (IDE) and its Application Wizard to work up an example from bare-bones to first demo user interface (UI). Other topics covered include app deployment, and the bada developer portal, which provides the interface to app publishing through the Samsung Apps mobile store. Chapter 4 moves on to explore the bada platform architecture, and to introduce some important bada concepts including bada s C++ namespaces, class library, security/protection model, and programming idioms. Chapter 5 introduces bada services, one of bada s exciting innovations, which integrate APIs for commerce, social networking, and other servicecentric features, with the platform APIs. This makes it easy to integrate services into your apps to stretch the boundaries of what users can do on mobile. NOTE: At the time of writing, some of these services are still restricted to partner developers, so keep an eye on breaking news on developer.bada.com as the developer story continues to unfold. To conclude Part 1 of the book, Chapter 6 provides an overview of each of the bada namespaces, highlighting the most important classes. Part 2 of the book presents a collection of recipes, organised into groups that show off the main bada features and provide you with ready-made code solutions to integrate into your own projects. What bada Is and Isn t bada (with a small b) is a new open smartphone platform for Samsung massmarket mobile phones. Open means that phones that ship with the bada platform are open to third-party developers, to create and publish native applications to phone users through the Samsung Apps application store. The vision of bada is that it is a Smartphone for Everyone. bada was created to provide a smartphone experience for more people. So, the major target customers for bada phones are not only techy early adopters, but also high school students. In a similar way, bada is not just targeted at existing geographical markets for smartphones but at developing markets too. To achieve this, bada is designed to provide powerful features while it supports a high level of configurability for a variety of hardware from affordable to expensive and powerful. bada s origins are in Samsung s proprietary platform, which was first used in Since then, it has been adopted widely for handsets and is used by

3 Introduction 3 numerous customers. For this reason, the proprietary platform has been successfully customised for a wide range of hardware as well as kernels. bada exploits the experience and knowledge gained throughout the history of Samsung s mobile platform. Well-proven concepts are re-used supplemented with new insights and improvements. bada is highly configurable over various hardware configurations and kernels. For example, the first bada phone, Wave, is very high end with a 1 GHz CPU and a variety of sensors, while some of the later phones use less powerful hardware but are affordable to the mass market. Such configurability for a wide range of devices will make bada the best platform for mass-market phones. Another noteworthy bada feature is the integration of service APIs into the platform. Services include social networking, buddy lists that allow users to share real-time information with their friends, shopping and commerce APIs, location and points of interest, and even weather services. All are included out-of-the box and can be integrated into any third-party application (but note the current restrictions on access to non-partner developers). It s worth emphasising that while bada is a new platform, much of the system underneath it (middleware and below) effectively re-uses enhanced version of components of Samsung s proprietary platform. If the significance of that fact escapes you, think of it like this Samsung shipped some 40 million phones a year in the touch-phone category in These are the phones that have made Samsung the global number-two handset vendor, pushing strongly to become global number-one. While bada won t open the box on previously shipped phones, it opens the box on the next tensof-millions of phones that Samsung will ship in this category this year, extending to perhaps hundreds-of-millions over the next few years. 2 This means that bada brings the mid-range, touch-phone category into your reach as an app developer, with a ready-made global audience, a proven middleware architecture, the proven touch-based UI, and potentially huge device numbers. And if you want to get a hands-on feel for what you can do with that, go into your local phone shop and play with the Samsung Wave (the first bada phone to ship). It makes for a compelling story. Just the Facts bada is designed for simplicity. bada offers a small but carefully chosen set of APIs that enable app developers to create simple but powerful applications. Remember, bada apps are not aimed at power users, but at the mass market of ordinary users, using their phones to get everyday tasks done, to keep in touch with friends, and to browse, buy, and have fun in between. 2 For example, see web reports that quote Samsung estimates of 15 million bada phones shipping in 2010, and over 50 million in 2011, available from

4 4 Introduction bada is More Than Just Another Smartphone OS bada contains a C++ class library as a framework layer, two more layers that provide features for controlling the device and accessing services, and a mobile operating system (OS) kernel. The bada API nicely abstracts from these layers and opens up the various functionalities to developers. bada is therefore (strictly speaking) not a mobile OS at all. Rather, it is a platform that includes the enhanced version of selected components of Samsung s proprietary (and proven) middleware with a clean and well-structured C++ class library, supported by a commercial, mobile RTOS kernel. bada is Open bada APIs are open to all. bada ships a free SDK, with open and free developer sign-up, and with publishing that is open to all via the Samsung Apps store. No, that doesn t mean that bada is open-source it just means that bada phones are open to third-party software, and any developer can be a third-party. At the time of writing, not every bada API is open to third-party developers; and in fact, some of the most interesting APIs are open only to partner developers. But this is an evolving position. In time, restrictions will be relaxed to make bada even more open when compared to other mobile platforms. bada is Native bada is written in C++ on top of C/C++ middleware, and bada apps are written in C++. bada apps run in a native OS process, with access to native OS threading. bada also supports Flash and WebKit runtimes, and integrates Flash and WebKit support into its native APIs allowing inter-operation and multiple language code. bada is Neat bada introduces some new, cool, network-based service APIs and integrates them seamlessly into the platform. These include buddy and social networking, location, and commerce and store APIs, which all interact with the bada Server to enable your app to track and exchange for example location data, including retrieving landmarks based on mobile location, and to swap instant messages and location data with the user s buddies. You can set up an online store and use bada s commerce APIs to interface your app with your store.

5 Introduction 5 Note: At the time of writing, these APIs are restricted to partner developers. bada is Easy Within reason. Native bada development is in C++, and arguably C++ is never easy. But bada does a good job of abstracting most of the complexity into its frameworks, where developers are insulated from it. bada makes good use of namespaces, is well-organised, and avoids the temptation of some complex features of C++. For example, templates are used very sparingly, and where they are used, they are used to good effect. bada is Buzzword Compliant bada supports more buzzwords than we even want to try to list! Check out developer.bada.com.

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