Slashdot Mirror
Palm Pre Development In the Browser
introspekt.i writes "Palm is building upon the Mozilla Bespin project to deliver an IDE for the Palm Pre entirely in the web browser. Apps can be developed on the server and then downloaded and deployed locally. It is an interesting tool, especially given that WebOS is so web-centric. This tool comes as a supplement to the existing development tools for Eclipse and the command line released by Palm earlier this year. The project is open to anyone who registers as a Palm developer, which is free to do."
I think it only got 10 minutes, actually.
I tried a Pre, such a POS. I like my iPhone, though I've shattered the stupid thing no less than three times in 6 months. Android looks very good, and if it is still on the same path in a year, I'm dumping AT&T and Apple and going with an Android device.
Learn about Photography Basics.
Their lack of smartphone marketshare is a definite problem; but I'm not at all sure that it is one that Java is going to help them with.
If anything, their choice of "more or less webapp languages and architecture, with a few local storage/access bits and bobs" seems fairly sensible(assuming they can get the speed issues of their first round worked out).
Because it is architecturally so similar to the webapp widgets and things that are being written, in vast quantities, to be put on the net and run on computers of all sizes, the amount of developer investment required to take existing work and bundle it up for WebOS is(comparatively) small.
Android, as an application API, is effectively J2ME-Touch-Pure-Web.
J2ME - it uses a lot of the core Java API.
Touch - it uses a custom Android UI API.
Pure - it dumps the JVM in favour of Dalvik, and it dumps a lot of legacy apps.
Web - it incorporates a lot of Java APIs from Apache, etc, for web uses.
If Sun weren't stuck in some weird place for the past five to ten years, they would have eventually come up with something like Android (but on the JVM instead of Dalvik) for the current generation of phones.
Google did the work for them, added their own twists and value-add as they deserved to do for the work they had done, and got going.
Care to detail that a bit? I have a Pre, though I'm not a palm fanboy by any means. I've had it more or less since it launched and it seems to be a pretty solid little device so far as my experience has gone. The browser is good, the GPS is handy, Wifi works, 3G data speeds seem to be fine, there are a fair number of apps available for it (and palm seems to be fine with grey-market community apps), it's easily hackable, the UI is great, though the battery life is mediocre at best (though my understanding is that this is hardly unique to the pre wrt smartphones in general). The only issue that I've had is that the little cheapy USB cover fell off, not great, but hardly a huge issue (I've certainly not smashed/shattered it, so perhaps our use cases are a bit different). So, given that, how is this a POS?
I don't see why it's still taking so long for "developing browser applications" to become indistinguishable from "developing applications". The browser is just an application framework that includes a network API, rendering API, and an API to its other functions. Since the browser became the overwhelmingly primary app framework for PC development, there have been several generations of UI frameworks that have come and gone, each of which had the opportunity to be both fully functional per OS platform and with the same API across platforms.
We should just be writing applications, any of which can use a cross-platform UI API and reach the network with HTTP and other protocols using a cross-platform API. Phones have so many different OSes, GUI layers and network protocols that they should be the first to unify into a single platform. Since Java promised that but failed to deliver many years ago, we should have something else by now that does do it.
--
make install -not war
I hope they don't think they're going to pick up serious developers just for making their tools web-based, as if that was an end in itself, so I hope that they believe there is some benefit to making their tools all web based.
Reading the articles, I'm no so sure that isn't what they're doing here. According to them this is about enabling a next-generation web-based development workflow. It's different because... the IDE runs in your web browser.
The kind of developers you want to attract to your platform, who are going to build the quality apps that you want to be a reflection of the quality of your platform your platform, aren't held up on account of the "barrier to entry" of such ponderous requirements as having to install a J2ME development environment or have local storage space available.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a longtime fan of Palm and want to see them succeed. I owned many of their PDAs over the years. But this isn't the way to go about it. This sounds like marketing running their engineering organization. A next generation mobile development workflow isn't one that lets met develop in a web browser. It's one that gives me powerful APIs at multiple levels so that I have an API of appropriate richness and complexity whether I want to develop a calendaring extension, whether I want to develop a social media client, or whether I want to develop a game. This does none of those things, and it should go with out saying that my products won't be targeting any of the current webOS devices.
Yeah! No one uses Palm platform! I mean, it's essentially HTML/CSS and Javascript, but I mean come on, who writes that anymore? No one knows or cares about html and javascript because it's useless! Nothing uses it and there's definitely no one out there who can make a living off of it.
I do hope my sarcasm tags aren't necessary, given how absurd you sound. Yes, there are plenty of Java devs out there, and yes, I do wish Palm would release a Java SDK for the phone, but the fact is that that's not the developer segment they're going after. They're aiming development for this phone toward the millions of web developers out there. I've tried writing an app for the phone when the SDK first came out, and though I had no experience with the Prototype Framework they use for Javascript, I still had a little VLC remote control app up and running within the afternoon, with a pretty decent UI. They use the HTML5 specs for a bunch of things and I've seen some pretty impressive things done on the phone.
The only major problems are the current lack of low level networking (homebrew coders have written services for the linux backend though, in Java no less, to work around this for things like an IRC client), and 3D acceleration, though apparently they're working on the latter and even hired someone a few months back as a graphics framework engineer for the phone. There's speculation that that's one of the things they'll be talking about at CES.
Now, let me be clear about something, I have a Pre, but I don't think it's the greatest phone or OS in the world. There's actually a lot that I wish it had that Android has, but at the same time, there's a lot that WebOS has that Android doesn't (let's not even discuss the iPhone, as I honestly don't care about smartphone that can't do true multi-tasking). Both platforms still have a ways to go to true maturity though, and keep in mind it's still very early in the game respectively. The Pre's been around for what, 6 months? Android's v1 was pretty bad and many thought it dead till more phones came out and the OS matured. The reason the iPhone is so popular is primarily because it was the only game in town for a long time, and it didn't even have its much touted app store when it came out, or 3D acceleration. The way I see it, the more competition, the better. And the more innovative and creative ways they can all try to pull in both users and developers, the better it'll be for everyone.
You are a troll. I suspect you know nothing about the Pre nor WebOS.
Perhaps you can clear something up for me: It was my understanding that in developer mode, you have a complete Linux environment, command line and all. Doesn't that mean you can compile C and C++ code to run on the Pre? Of course I know that the UI has to be handled through HTML/JS, but is it possible for the UI to talk to back-end components running as compiled code?
MichaelSmith's quite correct. This is Apple and Oranges, so to speak. All of the iPhone's applications in it's first gen were ACTUAL web apps hosted on a server. They weren't really even apps, just mobile versions of web pages. The Pre's apps are on the phone however, and leverage a TON of the upcoming HTML5 spec to allow them to do things like use a client side db, play video and audio, etc. These were things that the iPhone could not do through its browser. Not to mention that iPhone apps can't play with phone settings, contacts, etc, while the Pre's apps can, since they're not "web apps," they're just written like them.