[ShinAli]

There has been a lot of people posting on what they want from the Pre, so I thought it'd be cool to see what the developers want (in terms of anything).

The first thing I want is the damned SDK to be released already. I'm tired of Palm picking out big names to develop applications for them while they've been touting how they want to keep their finger on the pulse of the developer community. Right now, all they're doing is making me feel alienated.

The second thing is I want some form of a native SDK. The current Mojo framework is perfect for many consumer apps and a great decision by Palm. It opens up to many, many people to be able to develop for this phone.

Of course, there are people like me that are in love with Computer Science as a whole, and spent the time to become really good at all matter of things concerning software, especially low-level access to hardware. The native SDK will allow for many more things than just consumer apps, like opening up more avenues for other kinds of developers, like .NET. Mono has become quite the popular open source alternative of the .NET framework, and using that, we can create a portable .NET framework for the Palm Pre that could very well allow the use of WinMo applications developed using .NET. Not saying this is the way to go for WinMo developers, as webOS is a new OS and should be treated as such.

Right now I'm working on a way to allow developers to write in Java and compile that code into some compatible HTML/CSS/JavaScript for webOS. It'd be a whole lot easier if I had the SDK as I'm just picking out the small crumbs of information from the rough cuts version of the webOS book. That is no where near the native SDK that I want but I've been so used to OO principles, it's a step-up for me. I do plenty of HTML/CSS/JavaScript programming but web development feels like its just a bunch of hacks to get something working. HTML5 might alleviate this, though.

[cohoman]

As a developer, I would want lots and lots of example code provided in the SDK. I'd also like to have a very good Pre emulator for m PC, as well as a way to store data in an SQL database (probably SQLite).

It would also be nice to have way to sync or store data in the "Cloud", and have access to it from a desktop PC web browser. Finally, having the ability to access the calendar database directly to create home screens or today screens would be very beneficial.

[nKoan]

I would also want a deeper down SDK, rather than Mojo.

Mainly because I'm a native application developer and haven't messed with any Web technologies for 8 years now I'm sure I could pick it up eventually, but after skimming the O'Reilly book, it wasn't thrilled with SDK. Do you really have to declare the button in HTML, and then the javascript "object" to handle it? That just sounds so... old school. But, maybe I've just been spoiled by .NET and WPF.

[ido]

oh, cool, since developers are gonna see this thread, I REALLY wanted to ask you guys----how long before you think we'll be able to see some of your apps hit the scene? I'm dying to pimp out my pre!!!!!!!!

[gksmithlcw]

What do you want as a developer?

An SDK would be a good start...

[ShinAli]

oh, cool, since developers are gonna see this thread, I REALLY wanted to ask you guys----how long before you think we'll be able to see some of your apps hit the scene? I'm dying to pimp out my pre!!!!!!!!

No one can answer that unless they have the SDK, and even if they did, they can't say anything.

[eekfuh]

As a developer I want to be able to compile my code so if the device gets rooted they cannot see my source code directly.

Also I'd like to have a synchronous database calls. Asynchronous, which is done with javascript just seems like a bad idea. More than often would I want it synchronous.

[ShinAli]

As a developer I want to be able to compile my code so if the device gets rooted they cannot see my source code directly.

Also I'd like to have a synchronous database calls. Asynchronous, which is done with javascript just seems like a bad idea. More than often would I want it synchronous.

It really depends on how the SDK packages the Mojo applications, but I can understand everyone's concern over this.

I was about to suggest HTML5 database support but I just saw that it was asynchronous as well. I never worked with database using applications much, but couldn't you "pause" the application until the callback function is called? It ought to be easy enough since JavaScript is a single threaded environment.

[eekfuh]

It really depends on how the SDK packages the Mojo applications, but I can understand everyone's concern over this.

I was about to suggest HTML5 database support but I just saw that it was asynchronous as well. I never worked with database using applications much, but couldn't you "pause" the application until the callback function is called? It ought to be easy enough since JavaScript is a single threaded environment.

Javascript does not have a sleep or wait function built-in. Also if you do anything like a loop waiting for a variable to exist, then it becomes a blocking loop and will increase the wait time dramatically (example was a simple query went from 230ms to well over 18 seconds).

The only thing to do is wait for the asynchronous event to complete then use a call back. I actually am in the middle of development of a Database class that I will open source for WebOS developers and attempted many different methods to create a synchronous javascript function for executing database calls. Best method... asynchronous

[ShinAli]

Javascript does not have a sleep or wait function built-in. Also if you do anything like a loop waiting for a variable to exist, then it becomes a blocking loop and will increase the wait time dramatically (example was a simple query went from 230ms to well over 18 seconds).

The only thing to do is wait for the asynchronous event to complete then use a call back. I actually am in the middle of development of a Database class that I will open source for WebOS developers and attempted many different methods to create a synchronous javascript function for executing database calls. Best method... asynchronous

Dang. Maybe Mojo will have something for this?

I'm not much a JavaScript programmer myself, I only really got through it using Google Web Toolkit, which I'm hoping I'll be able to make it support compilation into webOS apps.