Eight months ago we announced our ambitious plan to make webOS available under an open source license and bring the innovation of the webOS platform to the open source community. We are proud to have hit another milestone with today’s Beta release.

We delivered on our promise

It has taken a lot of hard work, long hours and weekend sacrifices by our engineering team to deliver on our promise and we have accomplished this goal.

The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community.

Ideal environment for developers

Today’s release provides— not one— but two build environments.

Our desktop build provides the ideal development environment for enhancing the webOS user experience with new features and integrating state of the art open source technologies. Developers can now use all their desktop tools on powerful development machines.

Our OpenEmbedded build provides the ideal development environment for porting webOS to new and exciting devices. 

New build & Desktop functionality  

OpenEmbedded was a natural choice for many reasons:

• Its widespread community adoption
• Excellent cross-compiling support for embedded platforms
• And support for multiple hardware architectures
  

The build provides an ARM emulator, running core services such as db8 and node.js.We are actively converging on an OE Core image which boots to System Manager and the full webOS experience.

The desktop build brings together all of the elements released so far on the Ubuntu desktop. Our upleveled System Manager now has support for applications, including the Core Applications such as Calendar and Contacts, with their underlying Synergy services.What’s more, many 3rd party Enyo apps are supported too.

Community: Getting involved

No Beta release would be complete without a full complement of ways for the community to contribute and engage with us.  Come join the community to discuss porting, features and fixes on our mailing lists. You can also submit and track bugs and feature requests in our public Jira system.  

Finally, you spoke, and we listened. We have enlisted feedback from the community and have selected an approach to contributions inspired by the popular Linux Certificate of Origin. 

Community activity

Great collaboration continues on the Community Edition with the release of LunaCE. The webOS-Ports team have combined the community efforts into one package and made it simple to install on to TouchPad devices through their Preware software.

The latest release brings a host of new features including new Gestures and Card Stack Tabs.

As we work with the community to deliver innovation to the webOS platform, we will highlight and promote the most innovative and noteworthy contributions. Let us know of your breakthroughs and where you might need help. We have the specialists to assist.

Be part of our growth

We are continuing our hiring drive. Some great people have come on board and we are looking to add even more. Head on over to our jobs page for a full list of open positions.

Stay tuned for more updates from us, with the September release we will announce our future plans for Open webOS.

Show me the money!

So what does it look like? Below is a screen shot of the Open webOS Beta running on a Ubuntu desktop. The screen shot shows the iconic card view of the system running multiple applications.

The excitement continues to build as we approach 1.0 and beyond. Looking forward to hearing from and seeing you online in the community.

July has turned out to be a pretty packed month. The Community Edition has been extremely well received in the community. Developers have already created some very interesting modifications to LunaSysMgr that have enhanced the user experience on TouchPads.

We also officially announced the release of Enyo 2.0 at OSCON and have been picked up by xTuple to be their front end framework. The Developer relations team attended Open Web Camp in San Jose, Throne of JS in Toronto and GothamJS in NY. Head on over to our developer blog to read more about these events.

On to July’s Open webOS releases: You may remember that we released the System manager bus ahead of schedule back in April and are pleased to announce today the release of System Manager (also known as Luna) and the core applications.

The core applications provide a comprehensive set of platform user applications, including Email, Calendar, Contacts, Memos, Accounts, Clock and Calculator. The background services which support webOS Synergy functionality within these applications will be included with the full 1.0 release.  

We are excited to open up the active development branch of our upleveled System Manager. This major upgrade incorporates the latest QtWebKit and Qt technologies in an improved architecture. Modern QtWebKit now underlies all applications, providing state-of-the-art support for HTML rendering and I/O. The latest stable release of Qt has been integrated across the system, eliminating alternate rendering paths and providing a clean base for the future. These changes bring enhanced stability and performance to Open webOS. Look for us to actively continue developing System Manager. As always the source code can be found here.

With these components released, our next step will be our Beta release, including a revamped build system. We’re looking forward to the community being able to join us in taking Open webOS forward, to new hardware platforms, new form factors, and integration of other leading open source technologies. To that end, we’ll be providing a development-optimized environment supporting emulator and desktop.  

For Open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated. Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel (but of course, there is the Community Edition for those interested in improving the TouchPad). 

To continue this work we are looking for talented, experienced people to join us on our march to 1.0 and beyond. See our full list of open positions at www.webosjobs.com and come join our team.

As always your feedback is welcome and I look forward to talking to you in the community world.

Back in March we announced that we would make available additional components from the current release of webOS for the TouchPad. To distinguish this code from the Open webOS project, we’re calling these components the “Community Edition”.

Today we’re pleased to share the “Community Edition” code.

We have been working closely with WebOS Internals to bring this to fruition. WebOS Internals has set up a dedicated team for providing support for legacy TouchPad devices using the webOS Community Edition release. Going forward they also plan to support Open webOS 1.0 on well-documented mobile devices with readily available hardware drivers. The WebOS Internals team is called WebOS Ports and is led by Tom King (ka6sox).

With the release of the webOS Community Edition you can now learn how the TouchPad works, modify your TouchPad experience and then apply that learning to Open webOS 1.0 in the future. We are excited to empower the community to create custom user experiences on the TouchPad. For example, developers can now modify the card view, launcher, notifications, Just Type and more.

The Community Edition is focused on supporting the TouchPad. By contrast, the Open webOS 1.0 release planned for September includes modernized technologies to better enable the community to port webOS to the hardware of their choice, and to integrate open source technologies in areas such as BlueZ bluetooth and GStreamer. No matter which aspect of the platform you care about, webOS will provide options for you. The source code can be found here.

Finally, a quick update on our sister open source project Enyo, the cross-platform JavaScript framework for app development. Enyo has come a long way lately. An overview of the latest release was published earlier this month on the Enyo blog, and we had a very successful showing at the O’Reilly Fluent conference in San Francisco. Enyo was very well received by enthusiastic developers. We were also busy promoting Enyo’s capabilities at HP Discover in Las Vegas, which was attended by over 10,000 CIO’s and HP customers.

We are planning a busy month for July, where we will be attending Spain.js in Madrid, GothamJS in New York City, Open Web Camp in San Jose, Throne of JS in Toronto, OSCON and PhoneGap Day in Portland. And, we’ll be doing all this while also preparing our July deliverables.

We continue to see great progress on all things webOS and are marching forward in meeting our milestones for the 1.0 release.

Hope to see you at one of these events!

This month the Open webOS team is hard at work. Although there aren’t any scheduled code releases for May we are working hard in three areas.  

1.       We are still on target for the September release of Open webOS 1.0. and growing our relationship with the community, including our continued collaboration with the WebOS internals team. More news on that to follow next month. We were also delighted to be featured in LinuxPro magazine for the Isis browser we released last month. http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/News/Isis-Browser-Code-Released

2.       Our sister project Enyo is moving ahead full steam as well. Momentum has been growing behind Enyo and we are looking to increase its visibility by sponsoring the upcoming Fluent conference in San Francisco. I will be presenting “Enyo - A truly cross-platform JavaScript app framework” and Ben Combee will be presenting “A Deeper Look at the Enyo JavaScript Framework”, so come out and meet with us. We’re excited to meet more JavaScript engineers and look forward to demonstrate Enyo’s latest features.

3.       In addition to the Enyo open source engineering effort, our cloud services organization is beginning development on a set of Enyo API’s.  While we don’t yet have specific functionality to share or a timeline for delivering these new services, we want to let you know that we’re thinking creatively about how all of webOS’s capabilities can come together to add value to the developer experience.

To make all this happen, we are adding more members to our team. If you would like to contribute to the success of Open webOS (and get paid for it) please check out our job listings. And of course, all are welcome to contribute to the code through Github.

As we move into summer, expect us to increase our outreach out more and more, as we present our vision for Open webOS and Enyo to the world. This week I am attending the Open Source Business conference in San Francisco and we are busy planning other events that we will be attending. Local meetups are continuing and I’m looking forward to attending the Chicago WebOS meetup on June 3^rd and speaking at the Nodejs meetup on June 19^th.

Exciting times are ahead for Open WebOS!

In case you missed it, as April drew to a close we shared more code for Open webOS. April’s scheduled release included support for Node.js as well as updates to Enyo and Ares.

In addition, we were pleased to announce early delivery of the System Manager Bus (which was originally scheduled for July) and a release of three policy components based on our Platform Portability Layer. We’re happy to be ahead of schedule in getting these components of the Open webOS platform into your hands.

Node.js is a JavaScript platform for deploying event-driven applications. It also forms the backbone for writing services in Open webOS. The code available from this release includes the bindings necessary to access the System Manager Bus.

The System Manager Bus, also known as Luna-service2, implements the Inter-Process Communications (IPC) mechanism used by Open webOS. Included with the release are utilities for monitoring and debugging. More information is available here. We were pleased to have this piece ready ahead of schedule so we’re making it available to the community.

The three system policy components included in this release are Powerd, Sleepd, and Storaged. Each is implemented using our Platform Portability Layer and demonstrates how to interface to system devices. More information is available on the Systems Policy Components page.

The Enyo team has been hard at work. This latest release of Enyo includes a number of new features including the new List widget. Also, the Ares 2 repo is now public. Head over to enyojs.com for more on both Enyo and Ares.

Finally, as with other Open webOS components, you can find all the source online and detailed information at the project Web site. Keep the feedback, pull requests, comments, and ideas coming. Open webOS is already a better platform from the contributions the community has made!

Today, we are releasing DB8, the database service provider for all webOS components. DB8 is an abstraction layer on top of the chosen database engine, and as such is capable of being modified to use a number of different engines. This version marks the beginning of our project to incorporate LevelDB as the Open webOS engine of choice.

While the project is a work in progress and not currently buildable, we anticipate that it will be in the near future. Meanwhile, we will be continuing development in the open, and invite you to participate.

Today, we are releasing the source for Novacom and Novacomd. Novacom is a generic communication toolset to allow communication between a host and an embedded device using sockets over USB. Novacom executables have always been included with the Windows and OS X versions of the webOS SDK, and have also been available for separate download on opensource.palm.com.

With today’s release, you can now check out the source, build it, contribute, etc. You’ll find a user guide and a build guide here. We hope you will find this useful!

Hello, and welcome to the inaugural post on the Open webOS blog! We’re very excited to have a blog space devoted to the interests of Open webOS developers. We will be using this space to keep you informed of new releases, give you commentary from the project team, and to make announcements of various sorts. (You know—blog stuff.)

So, keep an eye on this space. We’ve got a lot of great information coming your way.