Biz & IT —

webOS legacy lives on as next-generation Enyo framework exits beta

New version supports building Web apps that work across desktop and mobile.

The Enyo sampler application running in Chrome on the Nexus 7.
The Enyo sampler application running in Chrome on the Nexus 7.

HP announced this week that version 2 of the Enyo JavaScript framework is now officially out of beta. The open source library has been deemed stable and ready for production use.

Enyo was originally the official development framework of webOS, the platform that HP obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Palm and later destroyed during Leo Apotheker’s reign of terror imbecility. Meg Whitman, who replaced Apotheker as CEO, decided to salvage the remaining value of webOS by opening the source code and building a community around the software.

HP first published the Enyo source code in January under the permissive Apache software license. The code drop included the original Enyo code, which was only intended to run on webOS, as well as a preliminary implementation of a major new version called Enyo 2.

Enyo 2 was designed from the ground up for greater portability, with aim of supporting Enyo applications that work across the full spectrum of mainstream desktop browsers and mobile operating systems. The Enyo 2 framework includes a new widget toolkit called Onyx that makes it easy to build Web applications that work well across different device sizes.

Enyo 2 has been under heavy development since the code drop. HP is still committing resources to the project, but has also collaborated closely with the independent developer community. Now that Enyo 2 has been officially released and has a stable API, it’s likely to start gaining adoption among Web application developers.

Alongside the official stable release of version 2.0, the Enyo project has also released several demos, including a "sampler" application that showcases the framework’s features. You can view the sampler in a desktop browser or try it on a mobile device. You will notice that the interface automatically tailors itself to the size of your window or screen, switching between single column and multicolumn layouts as needed.

HP intends to continue collaborating with the Enyo community as it works to further improve the framework. HP is actively hiring new developers to work on the project. HP is also sponsoring an Enyo hackathon that will take place next month in Sunnyvale.

Developers who are interested in using Enyo can obtain the code from the project’s official repository on GitHub. For details about how to participate in Enyo development, you can refer to the contributor guidelines at the Enyo website.

Channel Ars Technica