Palm Releases Ares Mobile Development Tools Beta

Palm on 17 Dec. announced the public beta availability of Project Ares, which the company called “the first complete set of integrated mobile development tools hosted entirely in the browser.”

The goal of the new Palm development platform is to lower the barriers keeping Web developers from getting involved in mobile development. Palm Ares makes it “easier and faster” to create Palm WebOS applications, the company said. Project Ares was demonstrated for the first time during a Palm keynote at the Open Mobile Summit in November and an alpha release has been available to a limited group of developers for the past few weeks. Then Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein referred to Project Ares during Palm’s second-quarter financial-year 2010 earnings conference call on 17 Dec..

The Ares site said: “Like webOS, Project Ares embodies Palm’s belief that the future of mobile will be built on the web. Project Ares aims to enable a next-generation mobile development workflow, in which developers move quickly and seamlessly from editing in a browser, to debugging on a device, to selling applications in Palm’s App Catalog or on the web.”