WebOS O’Reilly book online

Monday, February 16th, 2009

Cover of Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript Using the Palm Mojo Framework

Palm’s new operating system, webOS, for their upcoming phone Pre is something I am very exited about. I am a web developer and the possibility of creating mobile applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript is darn cool. Not only will webOS benefit from the large number of web developers but those same people will gain value in the job market.

In a latest post on the official Palm developer blog, the author posted a link to the first chapter of the upcoming O’Reilly book “Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript Using the Palm Mojo Framework”. I read through it and have selected some practical notes:

  1. The framework, called Mojo Framework, is based on Prototype. This should sound familiar to any JavaScript developer as it was THE framework to start all others.
  2. All applications have an index.html file. That’s right folks, just like in ordinary web development, this is the first file that gets loaded by application manager.
  3. Standard widgets will be included with the release with the possibility to overwrite their styles using custom CSS rules. For the artistically challenged, its good to know that default styles will be provided.
  4. Widget — lists, buttons, etc. — are DIVs with a special x-mojo-element attribute designating the type of widget. In the example, the widget is a button (<div x-mojo-element=”ToggleButton” id=”my-toggle”></div>)

In all, it’s a good read. I recommend that anyone interested in this device take a look. Additional topics covered include: common terminology, the card system, and the structure of the API.

Are you anticipating the release of Palm new OS?

Leave a Reply