Palm webOS [Paperback]

Mitch Allen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0596155255 | ISBN-13: 978-0596155254 | Publication Date: August 14, 2009 | Edition: 1

A Note from the Author and from O'Reilly Media about what this book does--and doesn't--do:

Palm webOS is a brand new platform and represents a very different type of operating system where the web runtime is used as the basis for the UI and Application model. Palm and O'Reilly felt that it was important to have a book available to help developers get a basic understanding of the new Palm platform at the time that the SDK was released; this timing played a major role in the content and structure of the book.

Ideally this book would have been a complete reference of the new platform but that wasn't possible since the content was written at the same time as the software SDK was being developed by the Palm engineering team. The book does provide a complete overview of Palm webOS, a thorough description of the application model and gives details on many key design concepts. There are descriptions and examples of UI widgets, services, storage, notifications, dashboards and background applications, serving as a great introduction but not as a definitive source.

The book uses a simple News reader application to illustrate the technical descriptions but the examples are not intended to serve as a cookbook tutorial. Experienced developers should be able to use the examples to build up a working application chapter by chapter but others may not find the loose descriptions adequate for recreating the application unaided. Over time, these different needs will be filled by other books, but in the meantime we hope that this book will serve a valuable role introducing developers to webOS and giving them a way of getting started with webOS application development.

A second printing of the book will update any original coverage obsoleted by subsequent Mojo SDK builds. For owners of the original printing of the book, all of these updates are posted on the "View/Submit Errata" link (please see left-hand column of this web page).

Thanks for understanding that book publishing and coverage of rapidly moving technologies can sometimes be an inexact science; we knew there'd be a need for a book such as Palm webOS: The Insider's Guide to Developing Applications in JavaScript using the Palm MojoT Framework, and there's certainly no better person to write that book that Mitch Allen; that said, we understand that because it is such a new operating system and SDK, there would (and will continue to be) changes that at best can't be documented and explored until new printings of the books are released. In the meantime we will be diligent in posting updates to this book's O'Reilly Media catalog page.

Description This is the official guide to building native JavaScript applications for Palm's new mobile operating system, Palm® webOS™. Written by Palm's software chief technology officer along with the Palm webOS development team, Palm webOS provides a complete tutorial on the design principles, architecture, UI, tools, and services necessary to develop webOS applications-including the Mojo JavaScript framework and Palm's SDK.

Palm webOS is designed to support a fast and superb user experience using established web standards, so if you're familiar with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you're ready to build applications for any webOS-based device, including the Palm Pre. You'll gain expertise, chapter by chapter, as you build a working mobile application through the course of the book. You'll also learn how to extend existing web apps to work with the new generation of mobile phones.

• Get a thorough overview of the webOS platform and architecture
• Understand the critical concepts for application design: what separates webOS from other web and mobile platforms
• Learn the details of Mojo's development tools and SDK for building and testing mobile applications
• Examine best practices, important considerations, and guiding principles for developing with webOS and the Mojo framework

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mitch Allen is CTO of Software at Palm, Inc. where he has worked in various positions for 8 years starting with building and leading the software team at Handspring which conceived and developed the Treo smartphone. From webOS's conception to implementation, Mitch designed the early architecture of the webOS platform and led the development team through the initial design stage and as a result is intimately familiar with the capabilities of the platform and tools. He is currently leading the design of the developer SDK and toolsets, and working with initial developers in their use of the platform and SDK.

Previously, Mitch worked at Apple, after 15 years developing image and text processing systems at Kodak and Agfa Compugraphic. He holds a degree in Math and Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire.

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (August 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596155255
• ISBN-13: 978-0596155254
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #657,695 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too Much Errata, August 15, 2009

By 

J. Mcclelland - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Palm webOS (Paperback)

It is a good book, but the errata is just too much. You can't even get the first few lines of code to work because they won't fix the file names. Basically, WebOS made an engine change in their file naming schema after the book was published. Therefore the entire book uses naming conventions that won't work. I've spent hours trying to find all the instances of incorrect file name reference to no avail.

Wait for another book to come out or until they fix this one.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Outdated and poorly organized, August 16, 2009

By 

V. Lee - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Palm webOS (Paperback)

While this book might suffice as a introduction to the concepts behind webOS, it is neither sufficiently complete nor organized well enough to enable one to create working applications.

Some chapters are written more like a novel than a traditional programming text, with large swaths of unbroken text. It sorely needs many more subject title sub-headers to make it easier to scan, illustrations, and boxed areas highlighting important concepts. Without these, one is forced to read some chapters in their entirety to avoid missing important points.

Even with these changes, however, the book's writing seems to reflect an author who is perhaps too familiar with the subject matter. Critical knowledge needed to create an application is missing, and the meandering text often references concepts, source files, and tools that are never introduced. Much of the book follows the development of a sample newsreader application, but missing during the discussion are tables of the available functions and features should you want to create an app that does something else.

Also, as a previous reviewer noted, this book was apparently written for a prerelease version of webOS, and some of the system method names and parameters are different from the actual release. Descriptions other critical methods and properties (such as public Scene Controller properties) are missing altogether. The current official SDK from Palm, on which this book is heavily based, has the same problem. Consequently, trying to create a working application is an unnecessarily frustrating process, ultimately requiring examination of the raw source code of the operating system and the built in applications, which is thankfully possible using tools and techniques (sadly) not described in this book.

Lastly, the composition of the book may leave some purchasers unhappy. While important topics (such as detailed use of the standard CSS classes defined by webOS) are intentionally omitted, a full 80 pages are devoted to a reference section duplicated (with errors) from the SDK. Another 50 pages are devoted to a full printout of a sample newsreader application. This space might better have been used for a chapter on tools, CSS, or a more complete index, which currently occupies just a scant 11 pages.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poorly organized and outdated content, October 5, 2009

By 

G. Scott Maclean (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Palm webOS (Paperback)

This is a classic example of a technical book written by someone who is far too familiar with the subject. The result is a book that leaves out critical information that may be obvious to someone who is already working with the technology daily, but leaves newcomers mystified. I am a 25-year veteran programmer, and I still found myself shaking my head attempting to understand the way some of the things were explained. Worse, it was rushed to market while the SDK was still in development, which means that a large amount of the content in the book is outdated or just plain incorrect. I spent hours trying to figure out why applications I had written wouldn't work, despite having written them to the standards shown in the book.

As mentioned in other reviews here, the book contains excessive amounts of outdated information that has been superseded and made just outright wrong by subsequent revisions to the SDK and other aspects of the OS. Too much of the book focuses on the development of the "News" application that is used as an example throughout, resulting in a narrow scope that misses critical information for developers attempting to write applications for webOS. This is a great book on how to write a News application for webOS, but not so great for learning how to write applications in general.

The reference section is little more than a Javadoc output - it describes the objects and their associated method names, but you are left clueless when attempting to figure out what the methods actually do, or how to implement them.

The last part of the book is a ridiculous 50-page code listing of the News application that had been used as an example throughout. This waste of paper should have been replaced with a single page listing a URL where the code could be downloaded. This would also have allowed them to update the online code example as the SDK was changed, to avoid using outdated and non-functional code as an example.

Overall, while this book was a good "here is webOS, here's a general idea of what you can do with it" type of manual, as the technical manual, tutorial and reference guide it claims to be, it is an utter failure. Not just incomplete with large holes of required information missing, it makes things worse by presenting incorrect and outdated information. As the only book currently available on webOS, it's obviously required reading, but I look forward to more complete and comprehensive books on this technology in the future.