Sugar Dave's Place

When I started trying to write applications for the Palm Pre last year, I knew nothing about JavaScript, very little about HTML, and pretty much nothing about CSS beyond what you would find at any online tutorial. These of course, were and are the cornerstones of the Mojo framework.

I started learning JavaScript with the help of a bunch of people (too many to name, really) in the #webos and #webos-internals channels on irc.freenode.net and slammed together enough HTML elements and horrible inline styles to make something that looked "good enough" to prove to myself I could learn how to do it. My first effort was going to be a paperless geocaching application. I bit off a sufficiently huge bite and decided that not only would I figure out how to parse GPX/XML files, but also tread the murky waters of the Mojo database. I was surprised by how much I liked writing JavaScript and making my phone bend to my will. I even managed to make the basic pieces of my application work. It could read a GPX file and display those caches as a list. If you selected one, it would use the GPS to give you pertinent details. I even used the <canvas> tag (!) and drew a pointer that would rotate to the direction of the selected cache. The best thing I learned from that first attempt was how to manipulate the database storage.

I went on a vacation to the mountains, and when I returned, someone else had released a really awesome paperless geocaching application, replete with glossy effects and fancy graphics. Oh well, I'm more of a logic person, anyway. After that, I developed a couple of applications that went on to live in the official application catalog. It's really easy to develop a webOS application once you get your head around how the framework expects you to behave. This is coming from a person with zero prior Web development.

Actually, I have come to the conclusion that I might have had an easier time learning JavaScript this way, since I didn't have to contend with more than one browser/platform. If you're just starting out with Mojo, I recommend dropping by the IRC chat room and ask questions. Almost everyone there is friendly and willing to help where they can.