BlackBerry Native

Networking 101

Learn about networking with our updated docs

If your app needs to send or receive data over a network (such as a wireless network or Wi-Fi network), you can use the networking features in BlackBerry 10 to get connected. In this article, we take a brief look at some of the documentation that's available to help you implement networking in your apps.

Networking in BlackBerry 10 is based on features in the underlying Qt APIs. In particular, the QtNetwork module provides most of the APIs that you can use to send and receive data. For example, you can use classes like QNetworkAccessManager, QNetworkRequest, and QNetworkReply to manage network connections, requests, and replies.

Our documentation includes a few sections that you may find useful:

Networking

This section provides an overview of the features in the QtNetwork module and includes code samples to help you implement these features in your app. Here, you learn:

The purpose of the main QtNetwork classes
How the major pieces of the QtNetwork module fit together
How to send simple requests (such as an HTTP GET request) and receive the results
Techniques to process network replies and update elements in your app appropriately

Diagram showing elements of the QNetworkReply class.

Explore the Networking Downloading sample app

This walkthrough teaches you how to access a remote server from your app and retrieve some simple data from a file. Here, you learn to:

Configure your projects to use the Qt networking library
Send an HTTP request over a network and save the reply data to the device file system
Check the current network status and detect changes to this status
Create a file in the file system and populate it with data from the network

Screen showing the Download a file sample app.

Tutorial: Use Secure Socket Layer

This tutorial teaches you how to create and manage a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection to a remote server and send data from your app over this connection. Here, you learn to:

Set up a secure connection that uses SSL and port 443 (the default port for SSL communication)
Use a certificate chain to verify the secure connection
Read data from and write data to an SSL socket

We're always updating and improving our documentation, so check back frequently and get networking!

4. Educate yourself

The Documentation tab contains tons of examples, tutorials, and best practices to guide you along the path towards building an awesome app.

The documentation for your preferred focus always appears at the top of the left-hand navigation, but you can still access the rest of the documentation at the bottom.

5. Start developing

The Reference tab is where you'll find essential details about how to use our APIs.

You can use the left-hand navigation to choose how you would like to browse the reference: by module, by topic, or alphabetically. If you have an idea of what you are looking for, start typing it in the Filter box.