Peter Wayner of InfoWorld has put Palm’s still brand new webOS Mojo SDK through its paces, and came away impressed. Still, there are a number of issues that need to be addressed, but all in all the big advantage he sees is that over the course of the past few weeks, a very active and fertile community of developers has organically created its own development community, creating open source applications everybody is free to install – contrary to the iPhone.
There’s no going around the fact that the Palm Pre, its webOS, and the Mojo SDK will all be compared to the iPhone and its equivalents. The Mojo SDK uses CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to create MVC-style applications, and according to Wayner, this is dramatically easier to use than the iPhone’s SDK.
“This framework is dramatically easier than using something like Objective C. There’s no need to deal with memory allocation or pointers, two briar patches that often trap even the best developers,” he explains, “The appearance is specified in the HTML and CSS, languages spoken by graphic designers. The MVC architecture means you can hand the HTML and CSS to the designer and the JavaScript to the developer.”
There are downsides, too, of course, when compared to the iPhone and Android, with the current lack of OpenGL being the biggest drawback. “Game developers used to OpenGL on the iPhone and Android won’t be able to do much in 3-D,” he says, “But I think that casual, two-dimensional games will be easy once people get used to the idea that DIVs can roam all over the page in different layers.”
Wayner also has a number of suggestions for the future of the Mojo SDK, such as that he thinks Palm should borrow ideas from the jQuery world. There’s also the possiblity of a browser-based IDE “that lets people create and test rudimentary apps in their browser.” He points to Google Gadgets as an example of this.
The best thing about the webOS, though, is the already very active development community that has emerged around the young mobile operating system. Even though Palm’s App Catalog is still in beta and lacking in content, the community has created their own way of getting applications on the device, and Palm seems to be okay with it, as some of the applications developed during its PreDevCamp event are available this way. Good news for those bummed out by Apple’s insanely restrictive that’s-not-your-iPhone-it’s-actually-ours-policy. So yes, among the 108 apps in the Homebrew section, there’s a Google Voice client.
Developers on the webOS platform are taking this all even further by hacking into the Linux-based operating system and making use of the more raw technologies in there. “Developers are actively digging into the Linux foundations of the Pre and finding they can build tools that work with the raw guts of the machine. Some are talking about writing Java services underneath,” Wayner writes.
He concludes by saying that “the current version of the Mojo SDK is merely the start of access to a very fertile platform. The Web tools are so well known and well understood that it’s hard to understand why more manufacturers haven’t tried Palm’s tack before.” I have to admit that I get more excited about the Pre as time goes by. I’m up for a new phone, but I’m holding off until the Pre arrives in The Netherlands. Hurry up, Palm!
From the article I gather that developers will be restricted in the amount of access they have to the hardware?
…and should they get full access to the OS, will they be able to use Palms ‘phone home’ capabilities, such as the alleged location information?
What is this smoke screen about ‘loads of developers who know javascript having access to building applications’? I can build applications with jQuery, but I can do that using a web application. What do I gain being a Pre developer?
just listen to the bs you are spouting:
“a very active and fertile community of developers has organically created its own development community”
what the hell does that mean? Organic, fertile developers?
Don’t you realise that this sounds like corporate nonsense talk in reverse and most embarrassing?
And what about the “Google Voice being available” when it is also available on the iPhone as a web service?
Where is the beef?
Personally I come to believe this is a load of rubbish, you get a web OS to play with but no real control over hardware nor OS unless you hack. Please explain if I am wrong. Please explain how the Web OS compares to Android or iPhone OS in as far as the access to the full capabilities of OS and hardware is concerned.
Oh, and then you don’t have a Palm Pre because it’s not out yet where you live… ah never mind.
Edited 2009-08-13 01:37 UTC
Maybe the title of my comment is not correct and it should read Palm,Apple,Google. In very related news,Pre is sending to Palm info about your location and user info. Apple’s bad? Sure. Would be nice if the SDK will allow access to the functions sending this info to Palm so that developers will disable them. Only then Palm is better than Apple.
http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/Palm_Pre_privacy/
I am not a web developer nor do I have a Palm Pre.
I think this is what the all the html5 people are going to eventually face. Here we have an os that all the apps are written in html+js but then you have people complaining that there is no opengl and other like libraries. Shouldn’t they be jumping at the chance at using 3d css+js libs? What happened to the ‘everything a app can do you can do in html+js’ war cries? When it comes down to it, there will almost always be an os under the web rendering platform. It will provide hook’s into the hardware to provide audio video and opengl through complied libs stored in hardware provided that some web dev doesn’t decide to roll his own version of the lib for what ever reason. I see this as a small test bed for the future of what the html5 proponents are championing, and it doesn’t seem to be going well.