Distributing BlackBerry Applications Over Internet

BlackBerry applications that you develop can be distributed over the internet quite easily when you know what you need to do. In this method users need to browse to the web URL and click on it so the BlackBerry will download and install the file automatically.

Step 1 - Prepare the Files
When you compile the source code of the application you will be getting a .cod file.
Check the file size of it, if the cod file is less than 55KBs then you can use it without doing anything more.
If that is larger than you need to do the following trick to make the application distributable over the internet.

• Change the extension of the cod file to zip.
• Unzip the zip file.

You will now see a set of cod files with names like App-1.cod, App-2.cod, App-3.cod, etc.

Step 2 - Prepare the Server
To make BlackBerry devices correctly identify and download the files you need to add or update the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) types in your web server. The required MIME types are as follows.
File Name Extension - MIME Type
cod - application/vnd.rim.cod
jad - text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor
jar - application/java-archive

If you need more details on how to set MIME types in different web servers please contact me, I will try to provide you with more details.

Now place the cod files we prepared in Step1 in the server.