Running webOS emulator - webOS in a virtual machine

I was interested in looking at Node.js as a potential framework for some back-end network services.

I initially thought about installing Node.js on Ubuntu, but then thought about trying it in webOS since webOS has been shipping with Node.js since Oct, 2010.

Getting webOS running in a virtual machine (VM) is easy enough. You'll first need to have Java and VirtualBox installed on your machine.

Then download the webOS 3.0 SDK here :

https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/develop/sdk_pdk_download.html

It includes a VM image which has webOS 3.0 pre-installed. You just run the downloaded installer, and it will configure the VM. Launch "HP webOS Emulator" from the Start menu and it will start up the VM in VirtualBox.

It took me a while to figure out how to navigate with the emulator. You have to, for example, use the left/right arrows to switch apps.

Here's a summary of emulator navigation tips :

https://developer.palm.com/content/api/dev-guide/tools/emulator.html

You can ssh into the Linux-based webOS. The emulator seems to configure a ssh port on 5522 in your desktop. So you can go in as root@127.0.0.1 -p 5522 (no password).

In the attached pic, I show the canonical example from http://nodejs.org whereby one can setup a simple HTTP server in 5 lines of JavaScript. Node.js is written in C, but it uses JavaScript as a "scripting language" or interface to the underlying framework.

An introduction to Node.js, catered to webOS use, is here :

https://developer.palm.com/content/api/dev-guide/js-services/overview.html