HP webOS Developer Blog

[Updated to clarify availability the UI Enyo widgets.]

Today I am proud to announce delivery of our February Open webOS commitments: extensions to QtWebKit, the release of Isis (our web browser), our integration with JavaScript core, UI Enyo widgets (to be released at the end of February), and our governance model.

The web increasingly provides the best option for cross-platform development. It continues to be rapidly adopted and improved upon by a wide variety of platforms. Developers look to standards-based web development as a way of deploying across the mobile landscape, maximizing the potential market. We’re seeing proof of that with the adoption of Enyo, which has been downloaded 40,000 times in only three weeks. With today’s release, webOS remains at the forefront of this emerging standard.

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Last week, I promised you an outline of the webOS governance model. Today, we’re publishing that model and announcing the leaders of the Project Management Committees. As you will see below, we’ve based the model on the Apache Way.

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Editor’s note: Today, we bring you another in a series of regular posts from Sam Greenblatt, the chief technology officer and head of technical strategy for the open webOS project.

After catching our breath from the first of many open source releases of webOS, we needed to get back to work to deliver on our commitments for February.

A key part of those commitments, as we shared in our roadmap, are extensions to QtWebKit. We are very fortunate to have a great WebKit team, led by Leonid Zolotarev. You will see an enhanced QtWebKit, a first look at the webOS governance structure (which will based on Apache methodologies), as well a few additional surprises, in the February release.

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Editor’s note: Today’s blog post comes from Sam Greenblatt, the chief technology officer and head of technical strategy for the open webOS project. He guides the project’s strategy around open collaboration and is responsible for technical engineering. His focus is on the practice of developing webOS with the community, and his approach is founded on the belief that the open source development model produces great software and web technology. Sam has many years of open source experience, including being on the board of OSDL (Linux Foundation). His long career in software development includes being a CTO at HP, Chief Innovation Officer at CA Technology, and CTO at Candle Corporation (IBM).

In December, HP announced that webOS would be made available under an open source license, with continued support from HP. We’re proud of webOS and its potential to harness web standards to improve the next generation of applications, web services, and devices.
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Well, you’ve been waiting for the big webOS announcement, and today we’ve made it. This morning, HP announced that webOS will be going open source with the resources of HP behind it. The Developer Relations team is very excited by this announcement and what it means for the future of webOS, and for you, our developer community.

With this announcement, Meg Whitman has reiterated HP’s commitment to webOS as a cloud-connected, scalable platform, while opening up new possibilities for platform expansion and improvement. She has also committed HP to a course of continued improvement to webOS, which means we’re in it for the long haul. Finally, we are committed to good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation of the platform.

Here in Developer Relations, we have the deepest appreciation for you, our developer community. You have helped to bring this announcement about through your passion and commitment, through periods of both promise and uncertainty.

We are committed to you as not only contributors to our app ecosystem, but now to webOS itself. We recognize that there’s a larger open source community of which we will now be a part, and are excited by the future now open to us.

We also know you’ll have a lot of questions, and we don’t have all the answers right now. We will keep you up-to-date on the latest developments, both in the forums and here on the developer blog.

We hope you’ll join us for the next leg of this journey!

There comes a time in a Linux-loving geek’s life when he or she needs a new challenge. Making desktop apps isn’t hacking it anymore and building yet-another-website seems passe.  If you want to jump into the world of mobile, here are a few reasons why HP webOS is the platform for you.

#1: It’s free.

There’s no cost to become a developer.  You don’t have to pay any sort of fee to download the SDK or submit apps. The webOS emulator is free and our tools support development on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. We also have discount programs to help developers to get their hands on real devices.

#2: We give you full access to your device.

You don’t have to jailbreak or root your device.What other platforms call jailbreaking or rooting, we call entering developer mode.  We don’t make you jump through hoops, purchase device certificates.  or use questionable tools; instead, we provide simple shortcuts from our launcher and phone apps.  Just tap on the “Just Type” search bar and enter “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” (the classic NES Konami code!); an icon appears that lets you toggle this mode on and off. In developer mode, you can get full access to the device over your USB cable.

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While working on a recent Facebook release, we ran into a performance bottleneck in the Mojo.Format.runTextIndexer API. Performance on-device was on the order of a couple of seconds to process the content for feed items 30-50. This combined with the other tasks in the formatting and rendering cycle led to poor performance in the news stream. In this post, I’ll describe a JavaScript implementation of this function we used to improve performance considerably.

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This post is the second in the series describing the usage and implementation of the preview image widget developed for the Featured Apps app. The first post can be found here.

Today’s posts covers the general implementation details of the widget as well as the movement and animation implementation.

Layout

Implementation of this widget is fairly straightforward from an HTML standpoint, consisting of a series of divs, with the associated JavaScript and CSS performing most of the heavy lifting.

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For Featured Apps we wanted to provide an attractive means for users to view the application preview images. Initially we investigated attempting to scale the ImageView widget to provide this functionality but its logic is tuned for displaying a single image and did not fit this design well, thus the creation of the new widget.

This UI displays up to three images to the user at a single time with one image being the focal point and portions of the next and previous images displayed for the user on either side of the focused image. The user is able to swipe between each of these images, allowing them to display an entire list of images without taking up significant screen space or resources.
Since this sort of UI may be a common need we have decided to open source its implementation as well a highlight some of the challenges that we ran into during it’s implementation. Today I will be covering just the usage of this widget, but future posts will highlight some of the nitty gritty details of the implementation.

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Palm made a huge bet on the web when we decided that our next generation operating system would have a Web runtime at its core. We are constantly investing in the Web and are always looking for great Web developer products, especially anything that focuses on device form factors.

When we heard that the jQuery team was putting a lot of effort towards supporting their great library on devices, we wanted to help. At first we started with devices for John to test on as he explored compatibility, but with the newly announced jQuery Mobile initiative, we wanted to do more.

What are we doing? We are going to sponsor some of the great work that will go into jQuery Mobile from jQuery team members such as the Filament Group who are well known for their work on jQuery UI and ThemeRoller. First and foremost, we want to allow the team to focus on making a great jQuery experience across the mobile Web.

Secondly, we will be working hard to make sure that webOS itself is a fantastic host for the product. This will mean testing help, and also some jQuery plugins that show off some of the great abilities of webOS (e.g. the notifications system) in a progressive way.

We are really excited to be working with the team as their launch into jQuery Mobile en force.

Here are some more details on the goals of jQuery Mobile from Mr. John Resig himself:

The jQuery project is really excited to announce the work that we’ve been doing to bring jQuery
to mobile devices. Not only is the core jQuery library being improved to work across all of the
major mobile platforms, but we’re also working to release a complete, unified, mobile UI
framework.

Absolutely critical to us is that jQuery and the mobile UI framework that we’re developing
work across all major international mobile platforms (not just a few of the most popular
platforms in North America). We’ve published a complete strategy overview
detailing the work that we’re doing and a chart
showing all the browsers that we’re going to support.

Right now we're working hard, planning out the features that we want to land and doing testing
against the devices that we want to support — and hoping for a release later this year. 

If you wish to help, please join the discussion in the jQuery Mobile Community.

Our aim is to provide tools to build dynamic touch interfaces that will adapt gracefully to a
range of device form factors. The system will include both layouts (lists, detail panes,
overlays) and a rich set of form controls and UI widgets (toggles, sliders, tabs).

But wait, “What about other libraries, frameworks and tools?” I hear you ask. The Web has a huge number of great projects. It has been enjoyable to see the great touch and mobile support that YUI 3.2 is adding, and we look forward to hosting the Dojo team at Palm for one of their events. Sencha Touch and SproutCore are showing us that Web applications can feel like “native” apps on other platforms. All in all, the future for a cross platform Web application world is bright. We look forward to working with the entire community to make it happen.