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."

What's the value proposition here for developers?

[dirkdodgers]

I hope they don't think they're going to pick up serious developers just for making their tools web-based, as if that was an end in itself, so I hope that they believe there is some benefit to making their tools all web based.

Reading the articles, I'm no so sure that isn't what they're doing here. According to them this is about enabling a next-generation web-based development workflow. It's different because... the IDE runs in your web browser.

The kind of developers you want to attract to your platform, who are going to build the quality apps that you want to be a reflection of the quality of your platform your platform, aren't held up on account of the "barrier to entry" of such ponderous requirements as having to install a J2ME development environment or have local storage space available.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a longtime fan of Palm and want to see them succeed. I owned many of their PDAs over the years. But this isn't the way to go about it. This sounds like marketing running their engineering organization. A next generation mobile development workflow isn't one that lets met develop in a web browser. It's one that gives me powerful APIs at multiple levels so that I have an API of appropriate richness and complexity whether I want to develop a calendaring extension, whether I want to develop a social media client, or whether I want to develop a game. This does none of those things, and it should go with out saying that my products won't be targeting any of the current webOS devices.

Re:Browser - Networked App Framework

[Doc Ruby]

I've been developing SW for 30 years, browser apps for 15. We do each of what you describe for both browser apps and standalone apps. That's not the distinction, even if browser apps are usually more of the ad hoc style than the engineering, and standalones a little more of the opposite.

Re:Talk About a Dead Platform

[Fallen Seraph]

MichaelSmith's quite correct. This is Apple and Oranges, so to speak. All of the iPhone's applications in it's first gen were ACTUAL web apps hosted on a server. They weren't really even apps, just mobile versions of web pages. The Pre's apps are on the phone however, and leverage a TON of the upcoming HTML5 spec to allow them to do things like use a client side db, play video and audio, etc. These were things that the iPhone could not do through its browser. Not to mention that iPhone apps can't play with phone settings, contacts, etc, while the Pre's apps can, since they're not "web apps," they're just written like them.