Development frameworks don’t make for exciting gadget news, but HP’s Enyo is kind of a big deal. It’s the little dealie that allows new webOS apps to stretch between vastly disparate screen resolutions — say, tablet and phone — and still work just fine, and since it’s based completely on web technologies, they can also run in a PC browser with no formal emulator or OS install required. While dev team lead Matthew McNulty pitched the browser functionality as a debugging boon, we’re starting to wonder if that’s how HP could bring webOS to PCs to start — rather than a dual-boot or a UI layer, it could simply make your favorite apps available in a web store
Don’t expect HP’s webOS 2.0 to be tied to an HVGA screen for long — come “early 2011,” the company will introduce a number of “really interesting new form factors,” including tablets and phones . That was the message driven home at Palm’s Developer Day this year, according to PreCentral ‘s Dieter Bohn, and the software that’s going to make that shift possible is a little something called Enyo
You may not realize it, but if you have the webOS SDK installed on your system, you’ve got the source for the Mojo framework there right on your machine available for reading. On Windows, we install it in the “share/refcode/webos-framework” folder under the location where the SDK lives (usually c:Program FilesPalmSDK), next to the code samples and webOS application source.
The fourth and fifth chapter of the Rough Cuts version of Palm webOS: Developing Applications in JavaScript using the Palm Mojo™ Framework by Palm Software CTO Mitch Allen is now available from O’Reilly. Chapter four is “Dialogs and Menus” while chapter five covers “Advanced Widgets”. Please visit Safari Books Online to download this chapter
