I make no bones about it, I like HP's (nee Palm's) webOS platform. The operating system is beautiful, the community is incredible, and the development process is a charm.
The power of webOS lies in the use of web technologies. You can build a quality app with nothing more than HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Web programmers will be right at home. For webOS 1.x and 2.x, you generally needed to learn an MVC style framework called Mojo. Mojo is old news -- starting with webOS 3.0, the new hotness is Enyo. The Enyo SDK is currently under NDA in the HP Early Access Program, but will be presumably be publicly released in the near future when the HP TouchPad ships on July 1st, 2011.
I'm not walking the Enyo road just yet. Right now, I'm having much more fun playing with PhoneGap, a cross-platform framework that allows you to write HTML/JavaScript apps and author them on multiple platforms. As of version 0.9.5, PhoneGap is Mojo-free. You write just as you would for a standard web page and include a little PhoneGap JS code. The best way to get started would be to download the latest version of PhoneGap (0.9.5.1 at this writing) and delve into Herm Wong's excellent webOS PhoneGap tutorials. His "Getting Started with PhoneGap WebOS 0.9.5" post is a good place for beginners, and includes links to other needed steps.
Becoming a webOS developer couldn't be easier -- or cheaper, for that matter. It's free. As in zero, zip, nada. Just sign up at the HP webOS Developer Portal. Community accounts will give you access to play around with the SDK and post in the forums, but you'll need a Developer account to publish apps in the App Catalog. For that, you need a PayPal account (to get paid) and a business tax id number (to pay the government).
By itself, PhoneGap isn't enough to make a quality webOS app. You need to add the functionality in bits and parts. As I discover more pieces of the puzzle, I'll put together posts and tutorials on the process. This blog will hopefully be an aid to others on the same path.
Ken Schreihofer
