Eight months ago HP announced their ambitious plan to make webOS available under an open source license and bring the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community. Today the company is announcing the beta release of the popular but ill fated ex-palm web OS.
The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community.
Ideal environment for developers
Today’s release provides— not one— but two build environments.
1) The desktop build provides the ideal development environment for enhancing the webOS user experience with new features and integrating state of the art open source technologies. Developers can now use all their desktop tools on powerful development machines.
2) The OpenEmbedded build provides the ideal development environment for porting webOS to new and exciting devices.
New build & Desktop functionality
OpenEmbedded was a natural choice for many reasons:
- Its widespread community adoption
- Excellent cross-compiling support for embedded platforms
- And support for multiple hardware architectures
The build provides an ARM emulator, running core services such as db8 and node.js..
The desktop build brings together all of the elements released so far on the Ubuntu desktop. The System Manager now has support for applications, including the Core Applications such as Calendar and Contacts, with their underlying Synergy services.What’s more, many 3rd party Enyo apps are supported too.
Community activity
Great collaboration continues on the Community Edition with the release of LunaCE. The webOS-Ports team have combined the community efforts into one package and made it simple to install on to TouchPad devices through their Preware software.
The latest release brings a host of new features including new Gestures and Card Stack Tabs.
So what does it look like? Below is a screen shot of the Open webOS Beta running on a Ubuntu desktop. The screen shot shows the iconic card view of the system running multiple applications.
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