PreDevCamp Palm Pre’s first Developer Barcamp Worldwide

After the work of few good people, the new formed Palm’s developer group launched a one day developers “camp” in 80 cities this Saturday.

The group attracted fairly large no. of interested developers. More than 2000 developers had signed up for the PreDevCamps.

PreDevCamp was organized by Dan Rumney, Greg Stevenson and Lisa Brewster. The volunteer, non-profit group is not affiliated with Palm or with the official Palm Developer Network. Sponsors currently include: BlueSwitch, PreCentral, O’Reilly, Zanox, and Adobe, with additional support from LittleSprings Design, Pivotal Labs and UE Architects.

The Group intended to stimulate the creative juices of attendees by exploring what’s involved in writing applications for Palm’s innovative webOS, migrating existing mobile and Linx applications to the new platform, and testing and optimizing them.

Presentations and hackathons reviewed the process of designing and building mobile apps for the Pre smartphone, using Palm’s Mojo software development kit, and a battery of traditional Web development tools.

Attendees included large variety of developers – mobile application developers, Web programmers, GUI designers and others, most often working together in groups, sharing the experience of programming for webOS. All attendees were encouraged to work on at least one development project, in one of five main application areas: media, communications, games, productivity and reference tools, and system utilities.

Palm’s webOS is powered with an embedded opensource Webkit engine with a multi-tasking Linux kernel, which lets developers use JavaScript, HTML and Cascading Style Sheets to create native applications that run on the Pre smartphone. Early developers working with the Mojo SDK were impressed with the speed of development and the sophistication of the applications. This hardware platform is very similar to iPhone 3G S. But the latter is more capable in graphics.

Out of the 80 cities, major events were in San Francisco (Palm’s headquarters), Kansas City (headquarters for Sprint), San Diego, and Dallas. But others were scattered around the globe, from Athens to Zurich, including Budapest, Ho Chi Minh City, Mumbai, Nairobi, Singapore, and Taipei. Attendance is likely to vary widely, from a bare handful in some cases to scores in others.

The event was modeled on the typical Barcamp phenomenon, participatory groups of computer users and programmers who create and present their own content. The first BarCamp was August 19-21, 2005 in Palo Alto, California, which was organized in less than a week.

Five hundred copies of the Palm webOS development guide, written by Palm’s software chief technology officer Mitch Allen are being provided to the PreDevCamps by Palm and O’Reilly Media, the book’s publisher.

You can get wikis, Forums, IRC, discussion over the PreDevCamp website.

Palm CTO Mitch Allen was excited about this event, he had sent this video to encourage developers at the camp.