Palm appears to be making a real effort to re-establish the developer base for their platform. While I’m a skeptic, webOS is a pretty cool idea for an application development platform. Remains to be seen how well it works, and if the trade-off for ease of development is the capability of applications. I’d bet good money that it will be a lot easier to develop applications for webOS than it is for iPhone OS, but I’d also bet that you won’t be able to pull off some of the low-level graphics processing that enables cool games and animations.
The first chapter of an O’Reilly book on developing for the OS is up on the developer site, and it’s being written by the lead architect. Wouldn’t it be great if the API and documentation were up? I’m guessing that means it’s still under heavy revision.