Report: HP's webOS Enyo team moving to Google

Members of the development team behind the cross-platform Enyo framework at Hewlett-Packard will be leaving the company to join Google, according to a report from The Verge. The report cites "sources close to HP" as saying that Enyo team members, including Matt McNulty, Senior Director of the webOS Platform and Enyo team lead, will be departing HP "shortly".

The Verge has no details on what the Enyo team would do at Google, but speculates that the developers will likely work on Google's open source Android mobile OS or work alongside the Chrome group on a future application development framework for the Chrome browser and ChromeOS web applications.

An official statement from HP neither confirms nor denies the report, instead it says that the company is "pleased with the traction Enyo has gained to date and plans to continue its development along with the open source community," adding that, "The Open webOS project is on schedule and we remain committed to the roadmap announced in January". Based on HP's timeline for releasing webOS as open source, version 1.0 of Open webOS should be available by September of this year.

Enyo is HP's cross-platform, open source, object-oriented JavaScript web application framework, which has a simple encapsulation model to allow apps to be constructed from self-contained building blocks. While Enyo was initially developed to support HP's webOS, the release of Enyo 2.0 added cross-platform support for Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer as well as other mobile browsers. Enyo 2.0 also added a range of widgets for UI creators. Enyo is published under the Apache Licence and the source code for Enyo is hosted on GitHub.

See also:

• HP releases webOS 3.0.5 sources, a report from The H.
• New web browser for HP's Open webOS, a report from The H.
• Comment: Is webOS the new Plan B for mobile?, a feature from The H.

(crve)