BlackBerry Development - JVM Error 104

During BlackBerry development, there are literally hundreds of hurdles that will get in your way.

One of which I noticed recently was the seemingly random error, which causes the "White Screen of Death" you can see below. This is caused by the dreaded JVM Error 104, which is a sort of catch-all something-went-wrong-and-you-didn't-handle-it kind of problem.

I say seemingly random, because I have noticed it for a variety of reasons. Some of these are genuine concerns for you, the developer, whilst others can be caused by something as annoying a null pointer, within the BlackBerry SDK code itself - I.E., in a place you can't handle whatsoever.

Solution
A useful trick for this when developing on a simulator and seeing these issues is to ignore the 104 errors. This is as easy as editing the Run Configuration (I'm assuming you're in Eclipse here) and adding a flag to ignore future 104 errors.

1. In Eclipse, hit Run menu, then Run Configurations...
2. Create new configuration or edit existing one
3. Choose Simulator tab
4. Choose Advanced tab
5. Check "Use customized command options"
6. In the line with title "Customized command line:", add the following to the end of the line     /ignore-error=104

You may want to do this for both Run and Debug configurations.


Oh, and do remember to restart your simulator once making this change. The command option will only be read during the launching of the simulator. Just caught myself out with this one momentarily.