The evolution of appinfo.json

Sunday, 12 April 2009 Ken Young

When Palm first revealed the contents of the appinfo.json file, we took a closer look at its contents in the first official Mojo SDK tutorial from Palm released February 25th, 2009:


{
   "title": "MyApp",   
   "type": "web",   
   "main": "index.html"   
   "icon": "icon.png",  
   "id": "com.yourdomain.app.myapp",   
   "version": "1.0",   
   "vendorid": "com.yourdomain.app.myapp",   
   "removable": true   
}

We covered the basic elements including title, icon, and id, and took a guess at main, version, removable, and type. We speculated that removable might refer to the ability to store applications on removable media in future devices and type might refer to native vs. web (Mojo) based (a stretch, yes, but what else would it mean)?

In any case, when chapter 2 of the Palm webOS book was released on March 19th, 2009, appinfo.json had evolved into this:

Property	Values	Required	Description
title	Any	Yes	Name of application as it appears in Launcher and in app window
type	web	Yes	Conventional application
main	index.html	Yes	Application entry point; defaults to index.html
id	Any	Yes	Must be unique for each application
version	x.y	Yes	Application version number
noWindow	true false	No	Headless application; defaults to false
icon	file path	No	Application's launcher icon; defaults icon.png
minicon	file path	No	Notification icon; defaults to miniicon.png
category	Any	No	Default category for application

As we can see, there were a few differences:

removable and vendorid are gone
nowindow, minicon, and category were added

So what does this mean? Perhaps nothing of long-term consequence. However, it does show that when the developer webcast was held in February, webOS was still in a state of major flux as this core application configuration file was still undergoing changes of this magnitude. Will it change again? As the book is still only in the "rough cuts" edition and Palm is actively seeking feedback on Mojo with its early access program, it's possible. We'll keep you up to date with any new developments.