Since its initial release less than two days ago, development has proceeded apace on the webOS port of classic FPS DOOM. The latest news, however, has implications beyond just this particular port itself. For starters, the game no longer requires any fooling around in the Terminal to get it started: you can now load it from an icon in your launcher, just like any other app. You can also fire up multiple instances of the game in multiple cards – possibly useless in of itself, but it’s great for that geek cool factor.
The technology being employed to make all this possible is the interesting part. WebOS Internals is now piggy-backing on Upstart (the Ubuntu startup manager, included with webOS) to allow webOS apps to punch in (via pre-defined scripts installed by signed, trusted apps) Linux commands on their own, which is how the Terminal has been bypassed. This new method will also enable dependencies in Upstart scripts, which will help homebrewers save precious memory on their webOS devices by not requiring all the back-end services to be running all the time. But the real kicker is that this now paves the way for all manner of SDL applications to be ported to webOS with very little effort at all – and there’s hundreds out there… not to mention it can also be used to control the 1600+ Optware command-line applications available for Linux.
