RIM is focusing on open standards, HTML5 and richer functionality with its next-generation BBX platform for BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook tablet.

The greater integration of HTML5 is a key area RIM is working on with BBX, with developers being encouraged to build web apps using the WebWorks SDK 2.2. “We’re really getting behind HTML5,” RIM co-CEO Mike Laziridis said.

The WebWorks framework provides developers with APIs to build HTML5-based apps. “This is your bridge between BB6, BB7 and BBX – you write it once, you can write it everywhere. It is the next mass platform for applications,” QNX founder and co-developer Dan Dodge said at DevCon.

Native apps are also a major element with BBX, and RIM is encouraging developers to adopt a variety of open source tools and standards. “We’re going to take and port all the system open source libraries, we will test them, we will post them so our developers can download those libraries, they can include them as part of their application and drop them right on the device,” Dodge explained.

He added that if it becomes clear that a lot of developers are using a particular library, RIM will make that particular library part of the BBX base platform.

BBX also encompasses the BlackBerry Cascades UI framework for advanced graphics, which RIM says will enable “super app” capabilities such as deeper integration between apps and the BBM social platform.

RIM VP of developer relations and ecosystems development Alec Saunders said that HTML5-based apps developed for BBX will be compatible with older platforms while native apps developed for the QNX-based PlayBook will be usable with BBX.

“It’s backwards compatible. You can take your HTML5 and WebWorks code and extend that back to the BlackBerry handset – I have seen applications that are written for BlackBerry 7 using HTML5 and WebWorks that run on PlayBook and also on some future unnamed devices that are coming. It’s also forwards compatible. Anything that you write today that’s either HTML5 or that’s built with one of the native PlayBook approaches will move forward in the future onto BBX,” Saunders said.

BBX – which was announced by Laziridis at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011 developer conference but which has no firm launch date – combines the QNX operating system that RIM acquired last year with BlackBerry technology. The BlackBerry Playbook is currently the only RIM device running QNX, with the first smartphones running the OS likely to appear in 2012.