First Look At Palm's Mojo SDK

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner puts Palm's Mojo SDK through its paces and finds the general outline of the system solid and usable despite 'numerous rough edges and dark, undocumented corners.' The main draw, of course, is the reliance on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which lower the barriers to entry, though with Mojo, HTML and JavaScript do at times work against each other, with JavaScript occasionally 'wiping out anything you do with HTML.' But more than anything, Wayner sees the current version of Mojo as 'merely the start of access to a very fertile platform. '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, pointing to sites such as PalmOpenSource.com and PreCentral.net that are cataloging dozens of apps that come complete with the source code. 'I know people are doing similar things with the iPhone — such as selling the source to people who must install it themselves — but the entire scene emerging around Palm has a much more organic and creative vibe. It's not getting hung up on parsing and reparsing the App Store rules.'"

Comments

Tethering

[Anonymous Coward]

Palm doesn't like this, but it's awesome so do it.

http://forums.precentral.net/homebrew-apps/191213-my-tether-tether-over-wifi-usb-bt.html

Re:What the hell?

[jo42]

Think of it this way:

iPhone == Windows (closed source)

Palm Pre == FOSS

How will this Help Palm?

[mpapet]

Since when does something that is technically better mean it's a viable competitor to Apple? History is *full* of technically better failures.

I've come to the inflammatory conclusion regarding the iPhone. The crazy rules of the app store and the phone's 'jail' are a demand accellerant. The intricate craziness of the Apple culture wins out over a vendor developing a relatively open phone OS.

Re:What the hell?

[MightyMartian]

Creative in the iPhone world means "App Store will likely tell you to fuck off". So I would think a more open platform is going to attract more creativity than one where a bunch of Apple goons hold all the cards.

Simplicity is Complex

[Ukab the Great]

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are three separate programming language/syntaxes (JQuery syntactic sugar would add yet one more pseudo syntax). To design graphical applications with them for the Pre, I'd have to use a text editor. And if I read the article right, I would have to fiddle with the command line to do development.

The Cocoa API is essentially one programming language/syntax. And I can design graphical interfaces with a graphical application (Interface Builder). And I never have to touch the command line.

No contest.

Re:Simplicity is Complex

[tyrione]

Your post is pure FUD. The bottleneck in any application worth writing isn't actually laying out the widgets on the page. Also, I can't see why using a graphical HTML editor if you were so inclined would be out of the question.

It's not how many "languages" or "syntaxes" one needs to learn that counts, but the complexity of the whole system. The system complexity is roughly comparable, and if anything, favors the Pre. Objective C is still an esoteric language; HTMl, Javascript, and CSS have been universal for 15 years.

I'll raise you FUD with FULL OF SHI*! CSS has not been universal for 15 years. Objective-C has been universal since 1989. I'm sorry you're to f'n lazy to write with it as part of GCC, but that's not stopping the massive surge in books being published for ObjC now that Apple is finally pushing Cocoa [NeXTStep made the Browser viable first: so much for the esoteric language] and with LLVM GCC can no longer keep politically delaying additions because let's face it, LLVM is pairing up with GCC and beating it on performance.

HTML 5 is the first version of HTML in 10 years. It's not because it's so universal and standard. It's because people spent 10 years trying to make XML be the end all, be all, of web development. And ten years later Apple and Google bring us HTML 5 with really useful CSS APIs now in WebKit dealing with 2D/3D space.

Meanwhile, we are just getting bits and pieces of CSS 3 with CSS2.1 still not universally adopted and implemented. I'll stop here. I could go on and on.

Decent Article on Mojo SDK State

[El Royo]

I've been developing applications for the Palm Pre for about a month and this article does a pretty good job of summarizing the state of the SDK. I was never a Javascript fan and was disappointed at first to learn that it would be the language for developing apps. However, I've since discovered that there's actually quite a bit of power in Javascript. One of the big hurdles for 'traditional' developers approaching the Palm Pre is that you have to learn up to five new technologies at once: Javascript, HTML, CSS, the Mojo framework and, optionally, Prototype. None of these is difficult on their own. Diving head first into all of them leads to a bit of confusion at first as you wrap your brain around them.

I have set up a blog where I discuss some of the more user-facing aspects of the Palm Pre: Pre101.com. I hope to bring out a more developer oriented site later.

HTML+JS+CSS? Apple did it in 2005

[toby]

Dashboard widgets, Dashcode IDE.

Tethering?

[QuoteMstr]

"Tethering"? I don't need to "tether" my Pre.

It's just an ordinary Linux computer that runs iptables and iproute2 like any other Linux computer. If I want to forward traffic over it, I can do it in exactly the same way I would forward packets through any other Linux machine. (Hint: the wifi interface is called eth0. The cellular interface is called ppp0. And it supports USB networking.)

The Pre is mind-bogglingly banal. We're so accustomed to twisted, badly-designed platforms in the mobile world that when we're confronted with what's more or less a boring old Linux system, our jaws drop in flabbergasted amazement.

Re:Tethering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Errrr... so when I do the exact same thing with my BlackBerry and my Windows PC, that's bad, because it's "tethering" and what you're doing is not. Something like that?

I don't get this

[commodoresloat]

yeah, the G1 isn't as sleek/sexy as the new Palm...

Have you actually used a Pre? It may look sleek and sexy in pictures, but actually holding the thing it feels completely flimsy, the keyboard is shit (and I say that as someone who really likes my Treo keyboard), and the application interface is frustratingly slow (half the time I couldn't even get the touch screen to work when I played with it). I didn't find it sleek or sexy at all.

Language exclusive SDKs.

[BlueKitties]

Microsoft at least has one thing it knows: cross language APIs/SDKs are a good thing. I wanted to perform some data mining on an Excel Spread sheet, I just popped open Python file and imported COM support -- tah-dah, Excel access in the language of my choice, with as many supporting features as the Java/C#/C++/PHP/Ruby approaches.