So the Palm Pre is generating a lot of (mostly) positive buzz.[1] There are still a lot of unknowns around it, details of the SDK are still vague, and it may yet all turn out to be sound and fury, especially since no one is allowed to touch it yet.
Most of the negativity so far has targeted the choice of Javascript as the programming language. Personally I've never had a problem with Javascript the language. I think Javascript gets a bum rap. It's a dynamically interpreted, loosely-typed, object-oriented language. Functions are first-class objects, and it has an eval() operator. Sounds a lot like... Ruby. Or Python. Or Perl. What more do you want? Closures? I suspect the Javascript hate comes out because most programmers only work with Javascript in the context of emitting Javascript code from their C# or PHP on the server side, and/or dealing with the inevitable cross-browser inconsistencies of the various Javascript runtimes. Those things do suck, but that's not the fault of Javascript the language. When I heard about an SDK with an Eclipse-based IDE that uses Javascript for programming and HTML5 for UI, my first thought was "Oh, okay, just like Flex Builder, Actionscript, and MXML."
Okay, back to the Pre: the party line is "it's just like building a web app", but we also know the Pre has features that have no analog in web app development. I'm curious to know how they handle things like the camera, or playing sounds, or playing videos. I'd guess the SDK comes with a library of Javascript APIs for interfacing with such things, but again, we don't really know yet.
[1] I don't like that name though. "Pre", by itself, implies that something newer and better is already imminent if you wait for it. A Palm exec said they wanted to communicate the idea of "the beginning of something new." It took Thomas 5 seconds to think of "okay, how about 'Premiere'?"
2 comments:
I really like the fact that the WebOS SDK is standards-based and is JavaScript, etc. Styling is easy as you're used to using CSS. Layout is simple as well. And a dynamic language makes for a low barrier to entry.
I think a lot of people take JavaScript to mean that you can't do anything powerful with it. It totally depends on what they expose in the SDK itself. The JSON message bus is supposed to have access to contacts, calendars, etc. I think this is going to be amazing!
PalmInfoCenter posts an interview with Pandora about developing for WebOS: http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9685/interview-with-pandora-about-developing-for-webos/
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