Recently, I ported some of my apps (MeePasswords, Q To-Do) to BB10. These apps use some Open Source projects as dependencies that were not readily available for BB10 yet; at least I couldn’t find them. So, I decided to give it a shot and try to compile the missing dependencies using the BB10 SDK. Fortunately, everything was pretty straight forward and I succeeded in compiling and using these dependencies for BB10.

The libraries are: the Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA), the Qt Messaging Framework (QMF), and QMLCanvas. You can get the compiled binaries from the repositories of my projects, that require those libs, at github. QCA and QMF can be found, e.g., in the MeePasswords Git repository. The compiled version of QMLCanvas can be downloaded from the Q To-Do repository. In those repositories you also find the patches that are required to build those libs for BB10, in case you want to build the libs on your own.

In order to compile your own projects against these libs you also need the matching header files and libs to link against. Both can also be found in the corresponding repositories; see lib/include or lib/link respectively. Additionally, you may need to tweak some settings in the .pro file. Those changes can be found in the respective .pro files of my projects as well. Furthermore, for actually using those libs, you may need to tweak some environment variables via the descriptor file. The descriptor files of my projects already include these changes.

The cool thing is that, this way, it is possible to use the very same dependencies for BB10 one would also use for, e.g., desktop apps, Harmattan apps, or the upcoming Sailfish OS. So, hopefully, this should help writing more cross platform apps.