WebOS Development - First Steps

Palm company managed to make a breakthrough at the beginning of this year, having turned from a manufacturer of almost identical Treo phones similar to zombies to one of the innovative companies in the market of mobile operating systems. The new operating system WebOS is used so far on only one device - the Palm Pre, but it is expected that the entire Palm product line will only use it. Thus, Palm refuses hopelessly outdated PalmOS and Windows Mobile that has lost any serious appeal.
WebOS is based on Linux (kernel 2.6.24). A distinctive feature of the system for developers is that it does not support either C / C ++ or Java - all applications are written in JavaScript using the Mojo framework.

A few months ago, I got access to the early beta SDK. Recently, the SDK is available to everyone. If you are using Ubuntu, MacOS or Windows, then you can start working.

SDK installation

First of all you need to register at developer.palm.com . After that you can download the SDK .
If you have Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit edition) or Windows XP / Vista (64-bit edition) installed, then the SDK will not be installed without the additional manipulations described here .
Before installation you need to install Sun VirtualBox 2.2.4 (the emulator works on its basis).


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As an official IDE, Eclipse 3.4 is proposed, which also needs to be downloaded and configured based on instructions .

Hello, World!

On the developer site posted a very simple Hello, World! for webOS. More advanced examples are supplied with the SDK: UIWidgets, which show all the interface elements in the work, Data - how to work with data storage (webOS provides cookies for this, HTML 5 Depot and SQlite databases up to 5 MB in size), and some others.
It seemed to me much more useful for learning webOS programming embedded applications. Since it is possible to connect to the emulator in terminal mode, the source codes of all user-level applications are available for viewing and downloading. Moreover, the license even allows them to be freely used in commercial projects!

Based on the built-in calculator, with zero initial knowledge of web programming, I riveted my first program for three weeks - Currencies (a program for currency exchange, of course).



Palm has already opened a reception program for sale, and Currencies is already awaiting approval (as I was told, it should take about two weeks). Programmers will pay via PayPal.