Palm webOS

News

After the core webOS applications, one of the first applications built for webOS was the News application. In August 2008, the webOS platform was far enough along that the webOS Engineering team wanted to have someone completely unfamiliar with webOS write a webOS application. An experienced JavaScript developer built a primitive version of the News application and gave us feedback on the tools and documentation. After a month, we ended the experiment, put the prototype into Subversion and went on with the project.

Over a recent holiday, I started poking around at the application thinking that it would be fun to get it updated to the latest framework and see what could be done with it. Within a few days, I had rewritten the application and had something useful; a week or so later it was ready to post on the internal website. I was amazed at how much fun I was having with it and felt guilty for continuing to work on it; it was addictive.

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader is a useful application and although simple to write, it uses a lot of the features of the framework, so it seemed like a good choice for a sample application in this book. We’re going to build the application up bit by bit throughout the book to explore how to write a webOS application and how to use the different APIs, widgets, and styles. We won’t use every API or every widget or every style, but there’ll be enough from each part of the framework that you can see how to apply the examples to things ...