HP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year’s end. Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript framework aside from any success or failure webOS ultimately achieves.
Sep 02
By Dion Almaer
webOS 2.0 SDK has just launched, and it has node.js built in (and more). The following is taken from my personal blog
At our last Palm Developer Day, Ben and I discussed future APIs for webOS including “JavaScript services” as a way to write code that runs on the other side of the device service bus using JavaScript.
If you think about it, node delivers a services platform for the cloud, so is there a way that we could work together? We got together with Ryan Dahl of Node to try this out, and it turns out that node works fantastically well on a mobile device! Major kudos should go to the V8 team for creating a great VM and to Ryan for writing efficient code that scaled down from the cloud to the device.
Today we announce that node is part of webOS 2.0:
The popular Node.js runtime environment is built into webOS 2.0, which means that you can now develop not just webOS apps but also services in JavaScript. The active Node ecosystem is on hand to provide community support and a rapidly growing library of modules that you can use in your webOS services.
Besides powering the new Synergy APIs, JavaScript services strengthen webOS’s support for background processing and add new capabilities—like low-level networking, file system access, and binary data processing—to the web technology stack.
I am really excited about this move for us. The node community is top class. I get to see this time and time again, most recently over the weekend and this week as I judge the node knockout. There is magic in the air with Node. It feels like the Rails days. I remember being so happy to jump to Rails and get away from the heavy world of Enterprise Java. It was a breath of fresh air to not have to argue with folks about every piece of the stack. “What about JSF with HiveMind and Commons-Logging and ….” Argh! Too. Much. Choice. And, a logging abstraction above Log4J was hilarious :)
Node is low level, yet simple. It is more like Sinatra than Rails. The event-based opinions keep you in good stead, and with cloud solutions such as Heroku and no.de you have great deployment stories, unlike Rails back in the day.
If you check out the modules that are growing daily, and the fun real-time hacks from the knockout you will get a good feel for node.
It feels great to have webOS as the first mobile device that embeds node. With db8 we offer a JSON store than can sync to the cloud (e.g. sync with CouchDB). This stack is starting to look pretty great.
Jun 07
Steve Gill of Nitobi has posted about a PhoneGap application called SnowReports. The application is open source and forkable on GitHub and shows how you can take a mobile Web application and port it between iPhone, Android, and webOS (and PhoneGap itself can even go beyond to other platforms such as Nokia/Blackberry).
Steve also put together a screencast that shows porting from iPhone to webOS in 10 minutes (as well as sharing tips and tricks of PhoneGap along the way):
If I put my Palm hat on, you may have heard about our $1M dollar Hot Apps program. It closes out at the end of June, but we have seen good apps rising in the ranks quickly. One recent example is Dropboxify. You still have time to get an application in the running for a decent prize. If you have a PhoneGap app already, then the 10 minutes are surely worth while ;)
