Open webOS 1.0 is ready to serve

(Phys.org)—Open webOS, formerly HP webOS, the mobile operating system that was initially developed by Palm, which HP acquired, was let out the door this week as Open webOS 1.0. The good news is that Open webOS can now be ported to new devices, according to the announcement. An OpenEmbedded build runs inside an OE emulator. Core apps that accompany the 1.0 release include e-mail and web browsing. The team behind the release says that there are 75 different components.

The webOS team also issued an exuberant news flash, on the heels of the 1.0 release announcement, saying that Open webOS has been successfully ported to a Google Nexus phone. This phone port is still, however, a work in progress. Tom King of webOS-Ports said they are working on getting hardware acceleration.

The 1.0 release has Enyo 2 support. Enyo is a JavaScript app framework "You can now take apps built on one of the best cross-platform JavaScript frameworks and easily run these same apps on Open webOS or other platforms," according to the announcement in the Open webOS blog.

Earlier this year, Enyo was open sourced under the Apache 2.0 license. The team focused on porting Enyo to work with iOS, Android, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and IE8. Enyo 2.0 includes a cross-platform UI toolkit, and a layout library that supports multi-form factor application designs for building apps.

Open webOS, though, still has a stay-tuned sign out for developers. The team behind it aim to cover an aggressive to-do list. In the works, they said, are integration for Qt5 and WebKit2 development tools, and compatibility with ConnMan network management. The ConnMan project provides a daemon for managing Internet connections in embedded devices running Linux. Also planned are enhancements including open sourced media and audio components and the Bluez Bluetooth stack. The Bluez is the Bluetooth stack for Linux. It was initially developed by Qualcomm and is available for Linux kernel versions 2.4.6 and up.

According to the team blog, "How long it will take for those additions to come along isn't clear just yet, but HP is definitely taking their commitment to webOS seriously, and hopes the community will as well." They said, "We expect to have more Open webOS port announcements in the future and will work with the community to deliver updates."

Developers can explore the release further by going to the Open webOS repositories on GitHub.

Steve Winston, chief architect, webOS, performed a video demo earlier this week, running the operating system on an HP PC.

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