WebOS and Enyo: Issues from a developer perspective
WebOS is a great OS that I like using very much. However things have progressed very slowly.
1. Enyo is nice but still needs more work and polish. APIs need to mature. The same old story that has been plaguing WebOS for a while now.
2. Enyo tooling support needs to mature. Seriously, where is the Visual Studio or even Eclipse level IDE support for editing Enyo code? Sure it runs in Chrome on the desktop but certainly thats not comparable to other modern offerings. Even Ares is not yet ready for Enyo for example.
3. Documentation is still not very good. Compare to the ton of books that I can get on Android development. HP is trying to remedy that with workshops and events, and that is good, but still needs a LOT more work. Maybe more video and learning material needs to come out of HP.
4. Enyo is not an open framework. HP talks a lot about “Web standards”. But guess what, Enyo isn’t a library you can use outside of WebOS right now so its as much of a proprietary framework as any other.
5. WebOS is not too aggressive on web standards and JavaScript performance is not top of the pack either. Take a look at this article.A bit disappointing for an OS that is called “WebOS”.
6. The Mojo compatibility story looks poor on the TouchPad at least. Take a look here.
7. Not quite sure what is happening about the weird paid app catalog carrier restrictions HP had in place. Not sure if they are solved yet.
I do think that Enyo and WebOS development tools have some way to go if HP wants to fight with the big players. Driving more aggressively on web standards will help. If more and more developers realize that web standards are good, then it will help HP in getting more content and services to WebOS. At the same time, Enyo and tool support need to mature and making them cross-platform will help as well. Clearly HP has the work cut out for them and it will be a long road. If HP continues to fall behind, I am not sure WebOS will be around for very long.
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re: (2) – we use RubyMine (http://jetbrains/ruby) and it works really well. While meant for Rails, the JavaScript & CSS support are top notch and make development for Enyo quite nice.