Hello World on the Palm Pre!

Well, it didn’t take me long to jump on the Mojo SDK for webOS. I have the Palm Pre emulator running along just fine on my Mac. I used to do quite a bit of HTML and CSS behind the scenes for our site here. I don’t have to do that any longer as we have a crack team of webmasters and coders that support the entire GigaOM network. But I miss my code tinkering and since webOS apps are HTML, CSS and Javascript, I think I might kick the tires of the Mojo SDK.

Although you don’t need it, I highly recommend grabbing the free Eclipse IDE and relevant Mojo plug-ins if you plan to do any webOS programming. The alternative is to use a command line for various functions and it just looks far easier to use Eclipse. The SDK comes with a few samples, including the traditional “Hello World” application. This Getting Started page is a good jumping off point. As you can see by my emulator screenshot, I’ve modified the basic Hello World code. It was drop-dead easy since I only needed to change some text in the index.html file. I also added a .png image file, which again is just done through the HTML code. It’s no different than adding an image to a web page.

Obviously, my “app” doesn’t do anything right now, but I only spent about 10 minutes with the SDK so far. Actually, it does do one thing — when clicking on my picture, the Pre opens up a new browser card and takes me to jkOnTheRun. For real functionality, I’ll have to read up on the APIs and dig up a Javascript book I have in my personal library. Although I’m not a programmer by trade, I can see why it appears easy for developers to create apps for the Pre. Now I’m really wishing I had stuck with my Masters in I.S. coursework at Penn State. I struggled with the C++ course and decided to drop the program to focus on my writing. Regardless, I want to see how easy or difficult it is to get data from the web, create apps with multiple stages (cards) and post data back to the web using service APIs, among other things.