Blackberry development on scripting language?

Question

From what I've seen, the preferred way to develop Blackberry applications is Java. Is this the only way?

I'm dreaming of a rapid application environment where you can create GUIs (using the Blackberry UI components).

Something like a port of Tcl/Tk on Blackberry... or Python/Tkinter... or something new, but similar.

Does something like that exist ? (I doubt it)

Can something like that exist ? (i.e., given the money, is it feasible/reasonable/...)

Answer 1

Yes, it does exist. Grab yourself the Visual Studio BlackBerry plugin ( http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/rapidappdev/vsplugin.jsp ), then you get the GUI just like the one you dreamed of.

The only downside (for me anyway) is that the language you have to write code in is JavaScript. The plus is that you get an incredibly rich framework to play with which gives you wrappers for a lot of functionality in the BlackBerry OS.

In addition, you get the really sweet data binding support straight up from any web service, something that's not trivial to do if you take the Java road.

Answer 2

If you can use Java/J2ME, you could always use Hecl: www.hecl.org

Edit - as of late summer 2009, I have started work on an official BlackBerry port for Hecl.