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."

Re:Talk About a Dead Platform

[hattig]

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.

Re:Palm Pre?

[Caffinated]

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?

Re:Talk About a Dead Platform

[Fallen Seraph]

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.

Re:Palm Pre?

[markdavis]

You are a troll. I suspect you know nothing about the Pre nor WebOS.