Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform [Kindle Edition]

Ray Rischpater (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform provides a soup-to-nuts examination of what it takes to design, develop, and deploy commercially viable applications for the QUALCOMM BREW platform. This new platform for wireless development is the solutions for delivering video and color games onto cell phones as you have seen in television advertisements. QUALCOMM Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) is a development platform that allows software developers to create applications that operate on all handsets that utilize the QUALCOMM CDMA chipsets. With over a million BREW-enabled handsets having shipped in the first year of BREW's availability and successful deployment with both a major domestic carrier (Verizon Wireless, with over five million subscribers) and overseas carriers (Telesp and KTF, with other carriers presently running trials with BREW), BREW is poised to become an important player in the wireless handset space. BREW offers a number of key advantages over other software environments for today's handsets to both carriers and software developers, including secure application licensing, integrated billing for application purchases, and down-to-the-metal APIs for high-performance applications including multimedia and gaming applications. Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform will begin with an introduction to BREW and how it differs from its competitors (J2ME, Palm OS, Symbian, and Pocket PC Phone Edition). After this orientation, the reader learns about what it takes to develop applications for BREW - not just development tools, but the methodology required to bring an application to a carrier for distribution.

About the Author

Ray Rischpater is a freelance consultant and author with over eight years of experience writing about and developing for handheld computing platforms. During this time, Ray has participated in the development of Internet technologies for J2ME, QUALCOMM BREW, Palm OS, Newton, and Magic Cap, and proprietary operating systems for vertical handheld computers. In addition, he's consulted during the development of websites for wireless devices using HTML and WAP. Ray is a senior software engineer at Rocket Mobile, Inc. and holds a bachelor's degree in pure mathematics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Wireless Web Development, Second Edition and Wireless Web Development with PHP and WAP.

Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 2739 KB
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (September 5, 2003)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B001NAAVZA
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars stay away!, June 15, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform (Paperback)

This book simply rehashes Qualcomm's SDK docs and adds some sloppy example code and some absolutely incorrect statements about BREW. I know people who have contracted work to the author's BREW software company. The company described many technical limitations of BREW, which were later proved simply not true. The company's programmers simply did not understand BREW. This book continues in that tradition.

You are better off sticking with Qualcomm's SDK docs, which are skimpy but more correct and concise than this book. If you really want a gentle intro to BREW, Ralph Barbagallo 's "Wireless Game Development in C/C++ With Brew" is OK, but you will still need Qualcomm's SDK docs.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction..., June 26, 2004

By 

Martin Crowley - See all my reviews

This review is from: Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform (Paperback)

Rischpater's book is an excellent introduction, reviewing both the existing documentation and the various gotchas you're likely to run into when starting BREW development. He organizes the work by the kinds of things you're likely to do (gui, network, etc.), making it easy to start reading the book, get comfortable with the tools and Ray's style, and then skip to things that relate to the application you're trying to write.

Especially helpful is Ray's inclusion not just of sample code, but of an empty sample application which is powerful enough to be the basis of a complete application. Not simply a "Hello World", I use this starting point now any time I work with BREW, both when trying things out and when actually building a real application.

It's a good complement to Barbagallo's book, especially if you're not writing games. I have both, and look at Rischpater's more often now that I've read both.

2.0 out of 5 stars Qualcom Brew Platform-Yes, Help as a programming guide-No, December 18, 2010

By 

George - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Software Development for the QUALCOMM BREW Platform (Paperback)

This book covered the Qualcom Brew Platform very well and the sequence of steps it takes to develop apps for Qualcom phones very badly. The programming guides were not good enough to take a beginner to the development of even simple applications.

The only positive thing this text did for me was to support the decision to recommend that my company pick another application development platform for their custom mobile apps. If someone wanted to create a development environment to discourage use--this is it!

The book was well worth the money spent to assure me that this was where we didn't want to be. Sometimes knowing what NOT to do is every bit as important as knowing what to do.