Software Development »

I’ve been working with my Palm Pre recently and as I decided to work through the SDK (Software Development Kit) I thought it might be handy to get a book on the subject – so I turned to the book “Palm webOS”, by Mitch Allen, and published by well known technology publishing company O’Reilly Media Inc..

The subtitle of the book is a less snappier, but more fitting, “The Insider’s Guide to Developing Applications in JavaScript using the Palm Mojo Framework” and it’s worth noting that the author, Mitch Allen, is the software CTO of Palm, Inc. who led the development team during the initial design stage of webOS – so he is well placed to introduce webOS. He sets about introducing the various aspects of webOS through a case study development of an RSS news reader application.

The book is set across 11 chapters with four appendix sections, opening with an overview of the webOS model and an introduction into the basic building blocks of an application, including Widgets, Dialogs and Menus, through working with Data types, before moving onto styling (Typography, Images), and finishing up with web based services, background applications, then localisation and internationalisation considerations.

Each chapter extends the news reader application with new features discussed in each chapter and the project holds together well – and you will feel right at home if you are familiar with MVC (Model, View, Controller) framework for application development. The book is laid out well and is easy to dip into for reference, though its worth going through some of the basics in the early chapters. The Quick Reference guide for developers in Appendix B is also useful giving an “at a glance” view of the various functions and components on offer within Palm webOS, in addition Appendix C does the same great job for the styling aspects of applications. The last Appendix includes the entire source code for the News Application.

The book has recently had a major price drop on Amazon so it might be worth getting hold of if you have an interest in web based software development (see Palm webOS).