HP webOS Developer Blog

PDK developers, your shot at Hot Apps is almost here! Starting July 1st, and running through August 31st, we’ve got a Hot Apps promotion just for you. Once again, we’re giving away $1 million in cash and awards, but this time they’re exclusively for PDK apps. So, if you’ve been looking for a little extra incentive to port your OpenGL/SDL games to webOS, this is it! Check out the details on the Developer Portal.

For those of you who enjoyed the Developer Day videos uploaded earlier in the week, but were waiting for the rest to be made available, today is the day! You can now see Kevin Decker discussing development of the new Facebook app, and Kevin Hague introducing Ares fundamentals, plus more great presentations that dig deep into webOS. And be sure to watch Aaron Ardiri’s discussion of game development using the PDK and SDL, and Dave Balmer’s presentation on graphics in HTML5. Enjoy!

Ben and Dion give the keynote

Kevin Hague on Ares

The UI team dispenses wisdom

Joe Hayashi Discusses Marketing

Back in January, Palm started using GitHub as a repository for sample code and other open-source projects. We’ve got several different trees hosted there, including our collection of webos-samples, Frank W. Zammetti’s game Far Out Fowl, and the RSS reader sample app from the O’Reilly book “Palm webOS” called News.

We’re now proud to add a new tree to our forest… please give a big welcome to pdk-samples.  This collection shows off our Plug-In Development Kit that’s used to turn your C and C++ code into programs for webOS.

We are starting with two chunks of code.  The first is “simple” which you might recognize from the current PDK installer.  It shows a rotating shape using OpenGL ES, it’s a nice piece of bling for your phone that won’t cost you $999.

The second and more extensive sample is called “shapespin”.  It seems similar to “simple” at first glance, then you realize that it’s mixing Mojo-based JavaScript code with PDK-based OpenGL goodness in a way reminiscent of those peanut butter-and-chocolate cups.  Not only can you adjust the rotation using a Mojo slider control, but you also can freeze its movement just by minimizing the application to a card.  Lots of people have been asking for more help with hybrid apps, and here an example to get started.

This is going to be a pretty long post, so I’m hiding most of it from the main page.  However, I want to get people to click on the article, so here’s the pretty picture that we’re using for our fake game studio logo, created using my elite Inkscape skills.

What’s our goal with part 2?  By the end of this post, you’ll have a PDK application that shows a picture then waits for the user to quit.  In theory, this will give the user something to look at while we process all the data needed for our super hot game.

Oh, and one last thing “before the cut”.  I apologize to our PDK developers using Mac OS X or Linux.  I’m doing my development using Windows and haven’t been able to test on the other platforms.  It should be simple to follow along, and I encourage you to post corrections and tips in the comments.

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Friday, April 23rd

Title: Introduction to webOS

Speaker: Josh Marinacci

Description:  To kick off our first Palm Developer Day, we’re holding a special preconference tutorial bootcamp on Friday, April 23rd, recommended for developers who are new to the webOS platform.  If you can build a web page, you can build a webOS application. That’s the beauty of Palm’s mobile platform, which is based entirely on the open web standards HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript – not like other platforms, which make you learn a new language. This hands-on tutorial introduction covers the nuts and bolts of webOS and more. By the end of the session you will have learned the basics of the platform, built and run a simple app of your own, and received step-by-step instructions on getting your apps into the catalogue and out to market.

Audience: Beginner & Novice.  Basic HTML & JavaScript knowledge is required.

Hello, I’m Ben Combee, one of the newest members of Palm’s crack Developer Relations team.  If my name sounds familiar, it should — I’ve been around the Palm world for a while, first as an independent developer, then as the lead on the CodeWarrior developer tools, then in previous stints with PalmSource and Palm.

In this series of posts on the developer blog, I’m going to look at our new Plug-In Development Kit (PDK from here onward).  Most apps now are written like websites; they have HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images, and they run inside the special version of WebKit we call LunaSysManager. PDK-based apps, in contrast, are originally written in C or C++, compiled down to ARM machine language, and run directly on the processor of the device. WebKit is still there, but it mostly stays out of the way and just gives the PDK application a window to draw in.

We’ve got three APIs that are used for PDK apps. The first is SDL (Simple Directmedia Library). Our current release is based on SDL 1.2. This API gives you drawing surfaces, 2D primitives, image loading, fonts, events, timers, network access, accelerometer (via joystick APIs), touch screen (via mouse APIs). It’s well described at the libsdl.org website.

The second API is PDL (Palm Direct Library, perhaps?). This gives access to some system services like screen orientation, the location system and the device ID number. It also has calls that allow your plugin to register methods that can be called from JavaScript. The reference for this is online.

The final API is Open GL ES. We support both version 1.1 and 2.0, although not both in the same program. Open GL ES 1.1 has a fixed-function pipeline and works well for a lot of 2D and 3D applications, while ES 2.0 uses a programmable shader system which is more complicated for simple programs, but very powerful in its ability to shift vertex transformation and shading into the GPU. I’m still learning the Open GL way, but I hope to blog about my experience getting some GL ES 2.0 sample code running on the device.

In part two, we’ll start building a SDL-based full-screen application with some code to implement the most important part of a good game, the studio logo that shows up on startup.

Ben Combee recently joined us here in Palm Developer Relations to work with the PDK, and he started a wonderful set of blog entries on it on his personal blog.

To be honest, we liked it so much we asked him to move it here, so we’re starting by re-posting his earlier entries and then he’ll continue that series here with us.

Chuq

Jeff Bush’s talk “An Overview to Creating Games with Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit” is now online and available for viewing. You can go take a look (highly recommended if you want to get a feel for the PDK), over at the GDC vault. (note: free registration required to view video)

We have some really exciting news to share with you. At GDC this week Palm and Epic Games are demonstrating Unreal Engine 3 on Palm webOS. Unreal Engine 3 powers Epic’s popular Unreal Tournament 3 and Gears of War along with a large number of titles from leading game developers. This is exciting news because it means licensees of Unreal Engine 3 will soon be able to build games for Palm webOS.

Earlier this week at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, Palm announced the public availability of the beta release of the Plug-in Developer Kit [PDK] for developers seeking to expand their options for creating apps for Palm webOS phones.

Together, the PDK and the Unreal Engine 3 will make it easy for developers to bring visually rich exciting games to Palm webOS phones. Developers can check out Unreal Engine 3 for free at www.udk.com. More information about Palm’s PDK can be found here.

To give you a taste of what the Unreal Engine will bring to webOS, take a look at this video shot at the GDK:

Video courtesy Engadget who also have a cool webOS App

Today, Palm is excited to announce the public beta release of the Plug-in Developer Kit (PDK), which was announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The PDK is a new component of the webOS SDK, letting developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK, and even mix them seamlessly within a single application. The PDK brings new functionality to webOS, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform.

The webOS PDK takes its name from the way that C / C++ components integrate into webOS applications. The webOS platform is built on web technologies, with an application environment built on the WebKit browser engine. Components built with the PDK “plug in” to webOS apps using the same mechanism that supports desktop browser plug-ins.

The webOS PDK incorporates the widely used multimedia library SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) and the OpenGL ES graphics API, making it easy for developers to port existing code to webOS. The PDK includes its own tools to support development and debugging of plug-ins for webOS applications, and (like the webOS SDK) will allow development on the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms (though only Windows and Mac are supported in the public beta).

(Note that distribution of apps built with the public beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update, to be released during the middle of this year. The current version of webOS supports limited distribution of games built with the private early-access PDK, but the technologies and processes that enable this limited distribution don’t allow for wider distribution.)

We’ve updated the Developer Portal with all the information you’ll need to get started. The Developer and Reference Libraries have new “Plug-in” sections that talk about the new tools and APIs, and describe how to get up and running quickly.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the Developer Portal, download the PDK and start developing today!