HP has decided to broaden the reach of webOS by adopting the standard Linux kernel, and it’s Enyo development framework is going to run on all major browsers. Enyo 2.0 has been open sourced.
Enyo is an object-oriented JavaScript framework initially targeting webOS and WebKit. After HP’s announcement to open source webOS in December last year, the company has decided to broaden webOS’ reach by porting Enyo to all major browsers and basing webOS on the standard Linux kernel. The first step was achieved: HP has open sourced Enyo 2.0, a core JavaScript library that now runs on Chrome, Safari, IE and Firefox, both the mobile and desktop versions. Enyo 2.0 is missing the UI toolkit which needs more work to run on multiple browsers, but it is promised to be ready in a month. Enyo-based applications can also be run as native iOS/Android/WP7 apps via PhoneGap as shown in this example. A developer ported the Paper Mache application to Google’s mobile OS making it available on Android Market.
Enyo’s philosophy is to allow developers to build large applications based on components that may contain any number of other components. A number of examples showing the source code and the results in the browser can be accessed at Enyo Samples. Enyo core functionality is packed in a 13 KB zipped file, making it appealing for mobile development due to its small size.
HP has detailed the next steps for webOS:
- The release of a WebKit distribution that supports HTML5 (including Canvas and 3D textures), Flash and Silverlight, plus support for application interfaces including multi-touch.
- webOS will make use of the standard Linux kernel greatly broadening the devices it can run upon. Sam Greenblatt, HP CTO and member on the board of OSDL (Linux Foundation), is currently leading the webOS strategy.
- webOS will use Google’s open source LevelDB, an embedded key-value data store, instead of the DB it is currently using
- Ares 2 is going to support Enyo 2. Ares is a browser-based IDE with drag-and-drop support for developing applications for webOS
The following table contains more details on webOS’ roadmap for the coming months:
Once open sourced, webOS will be called Open webOS and will be perhaps licensed under the same license as Enyo 2.0, i.e. Apache License 2.0.
