Gearing Up To Develop and Test Palm webOS Apps

Palm and O'Reilly are offering developers and testers a look at the Palm webOS and what it takes to develop for the platform. You can get a sneak peek overview of webOS here, where you can learn how the OS works and the terminology for the UI. Basically, webOS is an embedded Linux operation system with a custom UI built on a browser. I think the biggest deal about this device and its OS is the underlying development environment embodied in their Mojo SDK. Mojo offers a JavaScript framework that provides standardized UI widgets, and access to selected device hardware and services. I think this will attract a lot more developers to the platform than other devices because of JavaScript, versus Objective-C or Java. However, it's not the language choice that attracts developers - it's the richness of the device and its APIs. From the looks of things, Palm's webOS brings a lot to the party. Moreover, developers are free to develop their apps from scratch if they don't want to use Palm's SDK.

If you are looking to catch up on webOS and the Mojo SDK, then I recommend watching Mitch Allen's (Palm's Software CTO) presentation on webOS development. In the video below, he gives a preview into application development with the Mojo SDK, the development environment and toolset for this new mobile web platform.