HP-Palm’s Enyo: A New webOS Apps Framework

At HP-Palm’s “Developer Day” in New York this weekend, the company revealed details regarding its new application framework called Enyo, named after the Greek goddess of war. Reportedly, the framework loads apps faster, is more flexible and easier to use, and will help support a number of different device form factors, including the tablet computer.

Sponsor

Enyo will succeed the older framework called Mojo during 2011, but Mojo will not completely disappear.

According to HP-Palm’s announcement, the Enyo framework will offer the following features:

• Support for multiple form factors/aspect ratios
• Faster performance
• Modern, modular design – easier to maintain and reuse code
• Will work great with Ares (Palm’s UI builder tool, named after the Greek god of war)  – it’s built by the same team and has common roots.
• Hardware acceleration built-in
• Browser-based development

One of the key selling points for Enyo is its support for HTML5 standards – Palm’s Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer even said during their keynote speech that the Web and HTML5 will soon become a first-class app development and distribution platform. Almaer also goes into more detail about Enyo on his personal blog.

Enyo, which now joins other touchscreen UI  frameworks like Sencha Touch, Sproutcore Touch, jQuery Mobile, has made great strides in terms of performance, one of the areas where webOS needed to improve, explains Almaer. And it offers “fantastic developer ergonomics, especially around layout and event design,” which will help make sure that developers don’t leak memory, of critical importance on mobile devices.

Apps built using Enyo will natively scale to multiple aspect ratios. Engadget describes how this could work, by explaining what you see in the Enyo demo (the video embedded below from YouTube):

“HP’s Scott Miles demoed it earlier this week by playing around with a tiny, single-pane portrait email application in the desktop version of Chrome… and then maximized the browser window to reveal a fully-functioning three-pane landscape layout suited for a large tablet screen.”

This video below provides a first look at Enyo, including the demo mentioned above.

This news gives further credit to rumors of an HP-Palm tablet device running webOS 2.0, something which Palm chief Jon Rubinstein all but announced at the recent Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. He said the company is planning to launch a number webOS-enabled devices including phones, printers and tablet computers, but gave no other details as far as when or what they will be.

Discuss