The Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit
Palm Developer Center, 3/6/2010
We’re excited to announce a new addition to the Palm® webOS™ development platform: the webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) lets developers extend their webOS applications by writing plug-ins in C or C++. The webOS PDK makes it easy for developers to leverage existing code and exposes new capabilities — including high-performance 3D graphics.
The webOS SDK is based on web technologies. All of Palm’s own webOS applications use this SDK to deliver an exceptional user experience using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. However, we recognize that many developers have existing applications written in C or C++ and other non-web technologies such as OpenGL ES. While the webOS SDK provides a highly productive way to create new applications, developers should not be required to completely rewrite existing applications when only minor modifications are necessary to make them run on the webOS platform.
Further, the web has a long tradition of browser plug-ins, such as Adobe Flash and Google Gears, to enhance the experience provided by the web itself, often by augmenting the capabilities that web standards and browsers offer.
Palm has therefore created the webOS Plug-in Development Kit with the following objectives:
- Easy porting of C/C++ applications to webOS, including those that use OpenGL ES 1.1 or 2.0
- Easy integration of C/C++ components to enhance the capabilities of webOS applications
At CES 2010, Palm demonstrated many third-party applications built using a prerelease version of the webOS PDK, including 3D games from EA Mobile, Gameloft, Glu Mobile, and Laminar Research. These developers have been able to bring their existing applications to webOS quickly and with minimal effort using the PDK.
webOS PDK Overview
The PDK is based on the following core technologies:
- GCC for compiling C/C++ code to ARM native code
- SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer), a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL ES, and a 2D video frame buffer
The PDK supports a wide range of use cases, ranging from full-screen 3D games to compute-intensive tasks that run behind the scenes of an app written mostly in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Plug-ins can render graphics to the entire display, to just a portion, or not at all.
We’ll share more details on the PDK in the coming weeks.
HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and the PDK
The PDK offers access to some capabilities — like accelerated OpenGL-powered 3D graphics — that are not currently exposed to applications built entirely with web technologies.
However, we are hard at work delivering similar capabilities to all webOS applications. While we are not yet ready to announce our specific SDK plans in this area, we are closely tracking the rapid evolution of browser capabilities based on emerging standards, such as WebGL, CSS Transforms, and O3D for 3D graphics, and we are enormously excited about their potential to revolutionize the web.
You can expect us to aggressively implement the best of these and other similar forward-looking web standards, proposed web standards, and other extensions designed to expose native device capabilities to webOS applications.
Release Schedule
We have been working closely with a handful of partners as we refine the PDK’s design and initial implementation, but we’ll be expanding soon. A public beta release of the PDK is scheduled to be available to all webOS developers in March, followed by an official release in the first half of 2010.
Related posts:
- Palm releases WebOS 1.4, adds video capture, Flash 10.1 plug-in Daren Darrow, CNET, 2/28/2010 Updated to include WebOS’s new plug-in support for Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta. Palm’s release of its...
- Palm Shows Ares WebOS Development Tool Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service, 11/6/2009 Palm will introduce a Web-based development environment for WebOS applications, called Ares, by the...
- HP Drops Palm From webOS’s Branding, Launches HP webOS 2.0 Matt Burns, TechCrunch, 10/19/2010 HP just announced the next generation webOS and it’s a doozy. This platform now has all...
on March 7, 2010 at 1:37 pm
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