The crackerjack Web development duo of Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith leave the helm of the Mozilla Developer Tools Lab to join Palm to help advance the Palm WebOS and enhance its developer community.
The crackerjack Web development duo of
Dion Almaer and
Ben Galbraith have
left the helm of the
Mozilla
Developer Tools Lab to join Palm to help advance the Palm WebOS and enhance
its developer community.
Almaer and Galbraith are known as visionary JavaScript and Web development
experts. Together they launched the Ajaxian.com Website and then-in October of 2008,
just about a year ago-teamed to head Mozilla's Developer Tools Lab where they
created
Bespin, a coding
environment for Web developers. The duo joined
Palm on Sept. 25 as directors of
the Palm Developer Relations team.
Despite some criticism over sales of the Palm Pre, which runs WebOS, as well
as minor complaints by handset owners, WebOS is regarded as a significant
technological advancement. The hiring of Almaer and Galbraith is expected to
enrich the WebOS platform and community, and help foster more and better
applications for the platform.
In a Sept. 25 blog post,
Andrew
Mager, a Web developer at Ning, said, "This is huge news because the
Palm WebOS framework is not easy to work with. Building applications for the
Palm Pre is a challenge because the documentation is bad, the code is ugly and
the actual emulator is a nightmare to work with. I am confident that it will
improve now because Dion and Ben are the pioneers of Ajax,
and WebOS is build on JavaScript. These guys worked on Bespin together at
Mozilla, which is basically a code editor in a Web browser."
In his own blog post about the move, Almaer said, "There is a massive
opportunity with Palm WebOS to give Web developers the ability to deploy
outside of the browser, and onto the device."
Moreover, Almaer added:
"This feels like a pivotal time
for the Web. We have a convergence of:
??Ã
The personal Web (some are calling this the you-centric Web)
??Ã Mobile is truly here. With smart phones that are
full computing powerhouses, we are seeing amazing experiences thanks to
hardware and software working together
??Ã
The Web browser has become a rich platform and powerful runtime"
In a separate blog post, Galbraith said, "Dion and I believe in the Web
platform-an open platform that no single vendor controls-and we believe in
empowering and enabling developers. We have been honored to work with so many
who feel the same way at Mozilla, we will continue to advocate those values as
members of the Mozilla community and we can't wait to put these ideals into
practice in our work at Palm."
Katie
Mitic, Palm's senior vice president of product marketing, said:
"Now that our exciting Web-based
platform, Palm WebOS, is ready for developers, the time was right to ramp up
our Developer Relations team, to ensure the best possible developer experience.
When we sat down to think about the type of person that needed to lead this
team, two things were clear: we needed real developers at the helm, and they
needed to be developers with a deep understanding of the Web environment."
It seems Palm chose well. Almaer said a developer's innate curiosity and
passion for tinkering is what drives him to keep his finger on the pulse of the
Web development community.
"I have long been frustrated with the status quo with certain
platforms, and as I thought about what makes me happy as a developer; it is
freedom, choice and information flow," Almaer said in his blog. "I
feel passionately about bringing these values to mobile, and carry my Web DNA
with me. When Palm came to Ben and [me], we were curious to see how much they
understood what it really meant to have a 'WebOS.' The management team
impressed us, and persuaded us that they understand how important the
principles of the Web are, as well as the crucial role of developers. By giving
us the honor of this responsibility, they signal their intent."
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