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Two prolific open web standards advocates at Mozilla are leaving the non-profit foundation for Palm, vowing to spread their developer-centric gospel to the smartphone maker's webOS platform.
Ajaxian.com co-founders Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith have accepted new positions helming Palm's developer relations team. The duo announced their change of venue on their blogs this Friday.
"I have only really dabbled in the mobile world until now. I have always been excited about consumer electronics, but never really got into the developer environments," wrote Almaer. "I remember looking at the testing setups at companies such as Google, and realizing the pain in getting applications working across a huge slew of different proprietary API and capability. There is a massive opportunity with Palm webOS to give Web developers the ability to deploy outside the browser, and onto the device."
At Mozilla, the pair helped create Bespin, a web-based code editor with an emphasis on developer collaboration and code-swapping. Galbratith wrote today he believes the next push in development lies in the mobile market — although current restrictions are in need of a shake-up.
"My enthusiasm for this amazing new world is tempered by some unfortunate decisions by some of the players in this space," he said. "It seems that some view this revolution as a chance to seize power in downright Orwellian ways by constraining what we as developers can say, dictating what kind of apps we can create, controlling how we distribute our apps, and placing all kinds of limits on what [we] can do to our computing devices."
Obviously, a thinly-veiled jab at Apple, whose notorious hermetic seal on the iPhone App Store has recently spurred an investigation by the US Federal Communications Commission.
While Palm's WebOS and toolkit, Mojo, implement open standards like JavaScript and HTML5, it remains to be seen if the company will be as free and easy with development as Almaer and Galbraith hope for. The platform simply doesn't have the audience that Apple's ubiquitous device carries — leaving philosophical directives up to speculation until some notable apps that potentially undercut Palm's business scheme begin to appear. ®
COMMENTS
Apple likes open standards too
You're free to produce whatever Webkit/browser based Apps you like on iPhone, or to port your Pre apps to mobile Safari, which has a pretty full, high performance HTML5 implementation. So open webkit development is available for iPhone. Indeed, keeping Flash off the iPhone was a major blow Apple delivered for open content standards. But strangely, given the choice, developers prefer Apple's proprietary alternative. In fact you can have the best of both worlds, wrapping your open HTML5/Javascript App in a signed, sealed and distributed by Apple native wrapper.
@Giles Jones
"Nobody seems to mind the locked down nature of games consoles."
Nobody? Are you sure??
If that was the case nobody would ever have modded their XBox to run XMBC or purchased an R4 for their DSLite to run homebrew, or any other modchip(Viper GC etc) for that matter for all the previous generations of consoles, to get around restrictions such as region locking.There is a thriving homebrew scene on almost all consoles.
" Why bitch about it when it is a phone?"
People unlock their phones everyday to get around restrictions imposed by handset vendors.
No seriously. They do.Honest.
lol what??
"Two prolific open web standards advocates at Mozilla are leaving the non-profit foundation for Palm, vowing to spread their developer-centric gospel to the smartphone maker's webOS platform."
lol what? web standards guys from Mozilla and developer-centric in the same sentence?
These guys have been some of the heaviest backers of HTML5 and without question HTML5 is NOT a developer-centric standard. It's inconsistency (new tags for somethings, old style divs for others), it's ambiguity (redefinition of certain well known tags), the steps it takes to destroy separation of concerns throughout (embedding more content into the markup) make it as far from developer-centric as you can get.
No, HTML5 is designed for joe average, except joe average doesn't use HTML anymore, he uses MySpace, Wordpress, Facebook and so forth to publish his life to no one that cares. It's a crappy, poorly designed spec.
Just because people worked at a browser developer does not mean they know the first thing about developing web applications- this is evidenced by the abysmal quality of HTML specs coupled with the fact they've mostly been controlled by browser vendors, and how the cleanest specs in recent years that were controlled by the W3C rather than browser vendors (i.e. XHTML1 and XHTML2) have been poorly/not implemented by browser vendors.
Pretending these guys are in any way developer-centric when it comes to web applications is a complete joke. Looking at their inability to implement XHTML2, the abysmal quality of the HTML5 spec, coupled with other points such as how sluggish Firefox and IE is, how buggy Safari is on Windows, how many security flaws exist in all browsers I'd in fact question the general ability of most browser developers at all to be honest. They seem to be a hodge-podge of incompetent dreamers for the most part.
Certainly there's nothing come from browser developers and others involved in penning the HTML5 spec in recent years that would suggest they know much about enterprise and general large scale application development.
People like this are responsible for holding back the internet as a whole, please don't give them credit they don't deserve.
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