Automated Blackberry sign tool (Mac, Linux & Windows)
There is a way to get Blackberry to be built and signed, on Mac, Linux & Windows. Heres how:
Need I say more? Well for the most part no, these tools work exactly like described. All you need is the JDE bin and lib folders, and the ant tasks for bb-ant-tools.
However if you need to get the signing tool to work, there is a little bit of info you need to know:
The signing tool looks for 2 files: sigtool.csk and sigtool.db
These must be in the bin folder for the JDE, alongside the SignatureTool.jar.
If your on windows, this works fine. If your on mac or linux, this doesn’t. Why? Because the SignatureTool is stupid.
It looks for the files like this: “..\bin\sigtool.csk”. So on anything that doesn’t use \ for dir seperators, this doesn’t work. You can trick it though, by making a softlink:
% ln -s bin/sigtool.csk bin\\sigtool.csk % ln -s bin/sigtool.db bin\\sigtool.db
The signature tool now finds the files, yay!
Most people think the signature tools are restricted to your machine. However they are not. The csk and db file can be put on any machine, and the signatureTool will work. Be careful you don’t distribute your registration files though, because thats what RIM use to trace a malicious application.
For our development, I have put the JDE’s bin and lib folder into our subversion repository. So all developers can sign and build without needing to install the JDE, and it doesn’t matter what OS they are running either :)
Hope this is useful to someone, because theres not much info out there on BlackBerry development on other OS.
Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Blackberry, J2me.
Comments: 5