Palm webOS

Summary

In this introductory chapter, you were introduced to webOS, Palm’s next generation operating system. You should now have a basic understanding of the webOS architecture and application model along with the basic services available in the SDK.

You’ll find that it’s pretty easy to get started writing webOS applications. After all, you’re simply building web applications using conventional web languages and tools. You can port a very simple Ajax application by creating an appinfo.json file for your application at the same level as your application’s index.html file. With as little as that, your application can be published and made available for download to any webOS device.

From there you can invest more deeply by building in the Mojo UI widgets to take advantage of the fluid physics engine, gesture navigation, beautiful visual features, text editing, and the powerful notification system. You can move beyond simple foreground applications that rely on active user interaction, and adapt your application to run in the background or even as a dashboard application. You can also create an application that can open new windows for each new activity, allowing users to multitask within a single application. There’s a whole new generation of applications possible on the webOS platform, just waiting to be built.