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Months after Hewlett-Packard originally announced the open-source version of WebOS, the beta version of the platform is on its way out the door.
Today’s release includes two environments for developers. The first is the desktop build, which is said to provide “the ideal development environment” for designing the WebOS user experience with more features and integrating other open-source technologies on the Ubuntu desktop.
Some of those new features include support for core apps such as Calendar and Contacts as well as third-party Enyo apps.
The second is the OpenEmbedded build for porting WebOS to new devices. It’s equipped with an ARM emulator for running db8 and node.js services, and HP said that it included OpenEmbedded because of its “widespread community adoption” and cross-compiling support for embedded platforms.
Overall, the beta version of Open WebOS is comprised of 54 WebOS components available as open source, touted as bringing more than 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license.
When open-source WebOS was first announced last year, it met with a bit of a negative reaction because of criticisms that HP didn’t have a clear plan for the platform as well as uncertainty about how the platform would affect the mobile spectrum in general.
HP provided a few more details in January, including the news that the first version of the platform would be available by September of 2012.
HP more or less acknowledged in a blog post the lengthy time it took to push out Open WebOS to developers, citing that it required “a lot of hard work, long hours, and weekend sacrifices by our engineering team to deliver on our promise, and we have accomplished this goal.”
However, HP didn’t provide a specific date yet for when in September the release of Open WebOS will take place.
This story originally appeared on ZDNet.
