I have made claims about my Erie Canal app being the first BlackBerry app to make use of the Ionic framework, so it should be worth pointing out how this was done. Technically the Ionic framework only support iOS and Android, but it is based off of Cordova just like BlackBerry’s Webworks framework is. Knowing how well BlackBerry 10 supports HTML5 I assumed that it was likely that supporting this new framework would be no trouble at all.

Using either BlackBerry Webworks or the Ionic Framework require quite a bit of set up involving the installation of Node.js and Cordova but once everything is set up, the process is fairly simple. First create two separate instances of your new project, one with the Ionic framework, and one with BlackBerry webworks. Then copy over the www/lib folder from the Ionic project to the BlackBerry project. This folder includes all of the css and javascript that make up the Ionic framework (and also includes the libraries needed to support angular.js). Once this folder is included, BlackBerry HTML5 apps can be compiled as normal.

In fact the entire www folder can be shared between BlackBerry, Android, and iOS versions of the app with the platform differences mostly taking place in manifest files and the actual compilation of the apps.