HTML5 development firm appMobi has a gift for developers to kick off the holiday season. The company is making much of its HTML5 device-side APIs available as open source projects starting on November 25, otherwise known as Black Friday. AppMobi is releasing its DirectCanvas, device-APIs for iOS and Android and its MobiUs browser among hundreds of other HTML5 development APIs as open-source projects free for developers to build upon.
This cache of APIs is the type of trove that HTML5 developers could put to great use. For appMobi, HTML5 is not about the desktop, it is about mobile and it has worked to create functionality for device access by HTML5 applications including access to native functions like the camera, accelerometer and GPS. AppMobi is pushing hard on HTML5 development and, one way or another, it is trying to drag the rest of the ecosystem with it.
“This is our way of encouraging people to do mobile first,” appMobi CTO Sam Abadir said. “We want everyone to participate.”
What can appMobi’s APIs do? Well, what do you want to do? The Javascript API reference has dozens of API categories that tie analytics, cache and local storage, geolocation, audio and video, OAuth tokens, notifications and display. Fundamentally, appMobi sees the capabilities it provides as no different than native.
AppMobi’s Web Service APIs deliver updates and notifications to Web apps, something that has to go through the application stores in the native world. Out of the plethora or APIs that are being released on Friday, a couple stand out in particular: DirectCanvas, MobiUs and the device APIs. We have covered DirectCanvas multiple times at ReadWriteWeb. It emulates the standard Canvas but cuts out a lot of the steps unnecessary in mobile and speeds up rendering. Open sourcing MobiUs will allow developers to turn the browser into whatever they want, from a gaming engine to a Web app store.
This could be some kind of inflection point for appMobi. Fundamentally until now it has been a tool provider that makes money through its cloud services. That is not going to change. What developers can now do is build on to of appMobi as a base, working from the ground up as opposed to reaching into the tool shed for one of appMobi’s various products and APIs.
“We think that HTML5 is ready for this next step,” Abadir said. “We think what we are doing is akin to what Red Hat did with Linux.”
HTML5 is certainly one of the top stories of 2011. In the mobile development world, it is perhaps the No. 1 story of the year. Pretty soon there are going to stop being breakthroughs with HTML5 and it will be covered in the tech media in the same way that iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone are when each roles out new developments. HTML5 will be on par with the native environments, in many cases ahead, and each successive update to the code base will not be quite as big a deal as it is right now.
“This is going to be one of the biggest stories of the year for HTML5,” Abadir said of appMobi open sourcing its APIs. “We are really looking at HTML5 as the primary platform and this is a continuation of the paradigm shift for HTML5.”
Come Friday, the appMobi API’s will be available here.
Developers: Have you tried appMobi’s tools? Do they truly work as well as they say they do? Is this one of the biggest stories of the year for HTML5? Let us know in the comments.
