Mobile development: of the web, by the web — and now on the web
Today we’re opening Project Ares to the developer community. Ares takes a radically new approach that brings mobile development right to your browser.
Ares is the first complete set of integrated mobile development tools hosted entirely in the browser. It features a drag-and-drop interface builder, a robust code editor, a visual debugger, and built-in source control integration. Ares dramatically lowers the barriers for web developers to jump into mobile development and makes building webOS apps even easier and faster than before.
What Palm has done here is as significant as what Blogger originally did for website creation.
Click = ginormous
While that interface doesn’t appear Blogger-simple to a non-developer like myself, I can see how someone with the requisite skills would find it to be so and eat it all up.
And what makes this an atomic bomb-level debut is that iPhone developers are currently agitating about doing things on the web instead of via the SDK and the cloggy, irrational App Store approval process.
When Apple originally told developers to do web apps, they were abandoned to their own devices.
Here, Palm has said, Let us help you get that done!
It makes me wonder how many Apple developers — and would be Apple web developers — are looking at this announcement with extreme envy.
The eBook Test 
There’s a difference: Apple were throwing web development out there as an afterthought and not an actual plan; they were busy working on a native SDK (and one, I may add, that is light years beyond any other mobile device SDK).
With webOS and Palm, this isn’t ‘web development’; it’s ‘native’ webOS development. The fact that it uses HTML/CSS is immaterial. Palm had to do this because without it they have no SDK at all.
Woops, I forgot to add: Apple already has a web SDK for the iPhone called Dashcode – has drag and drop UI creation and a plethora of UI elements and stuff like bindings (where it can automagically match up a database with the UI).
Sure it’s not as full featured as Palm’s, but it’s certainly not to be trifled with
http://twitpic.com/tyblg
Wow. Thanks for the additional information.
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