Submitted by Palm has released the first chapter of a book that details its new webOS. It answers some of the questions people had about developing applications for the new platform. “You can think of webOS applications as native applications, but built from the same standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you’d use to develop web applications. Palm has extended the standard web development environment through a JavaScript framework that gives standardized UI widgets, and access to selected device hardware and services. The user experience is optimized for launching and managing multiple applications at once. WebOS is designed around multi-tasking, and makes it utterly simple to run background applications, to switch between applications in a single step, and to easily handle interruptions and events without losing context.” Ars has more.
While the API is good enough for most apps, it may be too slow for more advanced tasks – like games, voice/image recognition, custom audio and video codecs, compression, visualization.
Let’s hope there will be a way to use native code. No need for a native code API, just something similar to JNI(Java Native Interface) that will allow some computational tasks to be done by native code.
I’d say they’ll have a native coding put the promotion so far has been on the ‘web’ programming ability to demonstrate that no only are Palm ‘up with the times’ but also that the bar to entry is very low as to encourage a large ecosystem around the said product.
Its the old story that marketing only tells half the story – the story which the company wants emphasised to a given market.
Sort of reminds me of what Be Inc were trying to do with BeIA. Whilst BeIA allowed native apps to be embedded, it also wanted content to be web based. Unfortunately, browsers of the time didn’t really cut it in that kind of content.
Well Be was inhead of their time in many ways – often too far ahead.
A good example where their idea of using a 3D desktop – an idea that never left the drawing table.
I have never written a mobile phone app on any platform but having to use JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and AJAX sounds aweful. Apple tried this an failed, the first iPhone applications were just websites that looked good at 300×600 or whatever resolution it is. Ultimately people hacked it, jailbroke it etc and were running native apps before the SDK or appstore existed.
A lot of effort has gone into web technologies trying to make websites behave like native applications. Thats fine for something that you want delivered on the web, but for actual applications like games, calculators, photo editors etc, why on earth would you want that done in JavaScript?
I agree completely. I am professional web developer and I use technologies like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript on day-to-day basis. I can’t imagine myself using JavaScript to open file handles, query database – however, this sort of things is possible now on both – phones and desktops. I don’t want to do it because JavaScript isn’t for me (and lots of other programers) enjoyable in using. Ruby is. Java is. C++ is. C is. But JavaScript with it’s (advanced but..) hard to use object system is simply not right choice for building complicated, big applications.
What I *do* can imagina, and I already used – is mixing HTML/CSS/javascript with native programming (in C++, java, objective-c). This way you can develop interfaces rapidly and enjoyable using familiar HTML/CSS/JS technology, while having full power of devices you develop for.