marcus welz

Debugging web sites with the BlackBerry Simulator

I've never used a BlackBerry. Yet, I was tasked with debugging a web site that apparently had some issues with the BlackBerry. This rather outdated site was using frames, which is the first hint that there may be problems. However, according to the BlackBerry Developer's Guide (PDF) frames aren't an issue. They're simply processed and displayed sequentially in the same order they're defined in.

First thing I needed to do is grab that BlackBerry Simulator, a Verizon-branded 8130. Also needed is the Email and MDS Services Simulator, which enables the BlackBerry Simulator to use the Internet Browser, and have email functionality.

After that it's all fairly straight forward. Start the BlackBerry Simulator, fire up the MDS Services, go to Applications, open the Internet Browser, navigate to the desired site and look at the results.

And it wasn't pretty. Everything showed up correctly — well, as correct as it can on such a small screen — but some of the links were simply not working. Normally the cursor turns into a hand icon when hovering over a link, but it wasn't happening. Initially I thought maybe there was a style sheet issue, where perhaps the "hitbox" for the actual link had moved or been covered by something. However, that turned out to not be the case.

I employed a strategic debugging methodology which mainly consisted of "remove code until it works." And so I stripped down the files, deleting sections of html at a time — figuring it would eventually all fall into place. But it wasn't so. After I had reduced both frames to valid html in its simplest form — html, body tags, and a list of five links — the issue became apparent. There's a bug in the BlackBerry Web Browser. When the frames are merged, all links, except for the first two per each frame, are unclickable. They still look like links, they're blue, they're underlined, but when you hover over them with the cursor it doesn't turn into a hand, and the links are simply not clickable. They behave more like an a tag without the href attribute.