A lot of you have probably been wondering what the hell I've been up to. Obviously I haven't been doing as much work on the DynAPI as I used to, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy with DHTML. Most of the original group of "DynDevelopers" are aware I work at WebOS.com, but since there's a lot of new people around these days this may be new information.
I've been working on the Netscape version of the next WebOS API - this is a commerical quality DHTML/JavaScript API. It goes far beyond the capabilities of DynAPI2, offering a complete fully functioning platform for web based applications. This version is unlike the original MyWebOS product, this has been rebuilt from the ground up in pure JavaScript.
We're gearing this toward companies. It's a commercial product, with a price tag. I'm not in charge of selling it, but the talk is it'll be around $1000 for a full license.
I've posted a screenshot of what the final version will be like. This was taken in Linux, running Netscape 4.75:
http://fury161.dyndns.org/webos/webos-screenshot.jpg
Everything you see there is a fully working toolkit. You got dynamic library and application loading, layout managers, and enough widgets to build just about anything you'd like, and a handy debugger. All written in JavaScript, crossplatform, works in Netscape 4.5 (Win32/Linux/Mac), IE 4.0, 5.0, 5.5 probably IE 6.0, and Mozilla in a future version.
There will be a trial version of the API released in a month or so. You'll be able to download it, play with it, but you can't use it on your site or redistribute it unless you buy it. The API is open though, you can make applications for WebOS and distribute them as you please.
If you've done anything at all in DynAPI2 you'll understand almost immediately how to build apps in WebOS. Instead of DynLayer, you have webos.ui.Component, instead of DynDocument you have webos.getContentPane(), and the event system works similarly. The differences lie mainly in the amount of different widgets (although we call them "components" in WebOS), and the manner in which you build applications. DynAPI was built as sort of an add-on to existing pages. WebOS is designed to dynamically load up new apps on the fly. You insert WebOS into a page, and then load up your applications into WebOS.
If any of you are seriously interested in this for your development and looking for something more robust than DynAPI, give me an email (to: fa...@hy... or da...@da...) and I'll forward you to the marketing department and you can likely be on the list of the first people to recieve an evaluation copy.
Cheers,
Dan
BTW - I'm still working on my java-based editor for DynAPI, you'll see a first version of that released pretty soon.
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