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The future of development? Palm’s web technology grounded Pre launches next week

We’ve mentioned Palm’s Pre a couple of times here since it was announced in January this year.

Our interest is simple – the way you develop for the Pre and its new webOS is to use CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Now, this was the way Apple initially announced you should develop applications for the iPhone, but then ultimately realeased their own Cocoa based development framework for native iPhone apps, CocoaTouch, which we suggested was a “great leap backwards“.

Palm’s approach is different. The way you build native application is using core web technologies. Which opens up the Pre platform to any web developers to build native applications.

We strongly believe this is what the future of development looks like. For developing client facing applications, HTML, CSS and JavaScript will dominate in just a few short years. All other approaches will become niche or legacy – be that Objective-C and Cocoa, .NET, or one of countless other development environments. Controversial? Sure. But it will happen.

Consider what we are seeing in the development of standards and the browsers

  • The stunning increase in JavaScript performance in all browsers today
  • the introduction of “threading” of JavaScript via “web workers
  • the coming widespread support of the new W3 geolocation api in mobile and other browsers (iPhone OS 3 supports this, and Opera has released geo location aware builds of their mobile browser, while the upcoming mobile Firefox browser will also support this api, making location aware web applications supported in the most widely used mobile browsers)
  • offline storage with HTML5 (supported in iPhone, Pre and Firefox)
  • Canvas
  • and much more

the browser is becoming not only a first class development platform, but the most powerful platform for network enabled applications.

So keep polishing those web development skills. They’ll get more, not less in demand as time goes by.

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I had an absolute blast, learnt so much, and met so many great people

Carmen Chung Software engineer, Valiant Finance