Many have wondered just what the application development for the webOS would look like. During the Keynote, Palm CEO Ed Colligan talked about how development would happen entirely in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This sounded like it would be a very robust platform, despite Palm's claims that they developed all their native applications with the same tools.
Well PalmInfoCenter has an excellent interview with Pandora CTO 
Tom Conrad, who explains that unlike the original iPhone apps, webOS apps are fully native and have full access to native storage, internet access, and more via the Mojo SDK:
What you really have, is that you have an environment where a developer can write a traditional application – so, an application that gets installed onto the phone with all its code and all of its user interface elements and that is actually local to the phone. There's also a database and file storage that allows you to take data from the internet connection and store it locally – so when you're browsing your contacts, for example, you're interacting with an application that's local to the phone, with interface elements that are local to the phone and with contacts that are actually sitting on the phone.
What makes it this "webOS" is that the programming models for your developer rather than being C or Java is really just HTML and CSS and Javascript. So you can take a developer who's been developing web applications and quickly get them productive in the webOS SDK, leveraging their familiarity with these web-based standards. And that decision is one of the reasons we were able to get, very very quickly, a version of Pandora up and running. We were able to take one of our star web developers – someone who has never touched the Palm webOS and not done mobile development before – and have that person be immediately productive because it's all based on systems that they're familiar with from web development.
Sounds like a fairly robust platform to us, and the ease of development is perfectly in line with what we predicted in our Pre First Impressions article. Of course, really graphically rich applications will have a hard time in this framework, but Palm has definitely made some subtle "noises" that more robust applications with full access to the Linux core of webOS might be possible down the road. In the meanwhile, there will be plenty to do here and -- more importantly -- plenty of developers able to do it.
Comments
They mentioned that it only took 2 or 3 days to develop Pandora on webOS. I believe it took months to do the same thing for the iPhone.
Jack Thompson?
Interview link broken. Should be: http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9685/interview-with-pandora-about-dev...
Glad you got the new site up!
dieter, they are web apps, but not the web apps that we are uesd to today.
I'd do some research on IBM's SASH, where they created a whole development environment back in 1999-2000 based on this same model that palm is now pushing. the idea was to do two things
enable programmer to use javascrip tto create applications, and provide native "widgets" that could be added to the mix to enable further functionality.
I strongly believe this is exactly what palm is doing. these apps are inherently limited. you can't write a pdf viwer in it. you can wrap existing widgits, but you can't do anything that are not provided by the widgets.
i.e. try writing a pdf viewer if there isn't a pdf widget to control or add the ability to view other file formats that are not natively supported. it's good for some apps (such as apps that are already web based like pandora) and just use existing functionality on the phone (i.e. a fancy media player that just plays formats current media player supports).
I wonder if the term "client-side web app" would better differentiate the webOS approach versus iPhone?
It isn't so simple to say you can't write a PDF viewer in Javascript + HTML5. You could do this as long as Palm gives Mojo access to the filesystem or network to read the PDF data. HTML5 supports drawing bitmaps and vectors to the screen and Javascript itself is powerful enough for any calculations and transformations required to decode PDF.
The biggest issue would be how fast it is. There isn't a technical reason why it couldn't be as fast as Java or dotnet or other languages that run on virtual machines/interpreters.
The biggest limitation of Mojo will be for apps that need high performance (complicated games, emulators) or apps that need low level access to the OS events (new codecs, etc).
I think if they can pull it off, writing in HTML & JavaScript is going to be a good thing. I don't understand how they plan on doing it, tho. There are limitations. For example, most robust things like, say, games depend on 3rd party products like Flash. Scripting languages like JavaScript and VBScript are inherently limited because they DIDN'T want anyone to get access to the OS via the browser. But if WebOS has the APIs the script can call, then problem solved.
I don't think we should be too quick to condemn the decision to go with HTML in WebOS. The folks that wrote it know all the things we're saying. And remember, the same arguments were being made about Android development in Java. 1 million G1's later and a growing App Market shows that such fears were unfounded.
While I am an Android fanboy, I'm a techie first. I think it's great Palm is swinging with such a big bat. I look forward to seeing what Microsoft does with Windows Mobile 7.
to the person that responded to me about that you can write a pdf viewer in javascript/html.
you're right, except I'd argue that basically that means the palm will e its own paltform as all existing code can't be reused.
that severly impacts the ability to actually write applications.
I also doubt one could write a palmos emulator in javascript and have it run efficiently :) (especially if you throw the armlets into the mix). Though the fact that palm seems to say that a third party could write that seems to be indicative to me that the html/javascript is really just front-end programming, while one will also be able to write "widgets" in "real men's manly languages"(tm). :)
I don't think we should be too quick to condemn the decision to go with HTML in WebOS.blueoo.com
I wonder if the term "client-side web app" would better differentiate the webOS approach versus iPhone?
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