Eclipse is an open source community originally created by IBM in November of 2001. According to its site, the community’s projects mainly focus on building an open development platform made of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, as well as deploying and managing, software across the life cycle. Perhaps the most important and pertinent aspect of Eclipse is that it focuses on enabling the use of open source technology in commercial software products and services. The community constantly makes an effort to promote and encourage other software vendors to use Eclipse technology for their own commercial software products and services.

This communal message must have been received by RIM and BlackBerry, because there is already a BlackBerry Java Development (JDE) for Eclipse in existence, and it’s ideal for developers who use the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE), as it offers an extremely familiar way to construct and test rich mobile apps created for BlackBerry smartphones.

So what are these familiar tools? As an Eclipse developer, the BlackBerry JDE Plug-in for Eclipse enables you to write, test, and compile Java Platform, Mobile Edition (Java ME) apps that will run on BlackBerry devices. Impressively, the plug-in will also simulate an entire end-to-end online and offline user experience from the perspective of a number of BlackBerry smartphone models -- all from your desktop. The BlackBerry JDE plug-in for Eclipse also features the compilation of key Java Specification Requests (JSRs), which will allow developers to take advantage of the latest Java ME developments. This feature is especially advantageous as it enables its users to create cutting-edge mobile apps that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

All of the already-mentioned attributes are incredibly beneficial to a developer, but it should also be pointed out that the JDE Eclipse plug-in enables its users to take advantage of all of the unique strengths associated with developing for the BlackBerry platform. Nowhere else can you find integration with native smartphone apps, which will provide users with a seamless BlackBerry experience.

This, of course, is intended to be a tutorial about debugging your BlackBerry apps. So, where does Eclipse fall into all of this? It just so happens that Eclipse provides an incredibly easy and efficient way to debug your BlackBerry apps. Here’s a simple synopsis of the debugging tools featured on Eclipse, as provided by BlackBerry...