Project Spartan is rumored to be Facebook’s upcoming HTML5 platform. Speculation suggests the social networking giant will use it to challenge Apple, Google, or both in the mobile app space.
Project Spartan was expected to be announced in July, but we’re in September now and it still hasn’t seen the light of day. Some expected it to arrive this week at Facebook’s f8 developer conference, but now Facebook is apparently worried that the project will overshadow some of the company’s other big announcements. As a result, the HTML5 platform won’t be announced at f8, according to TechCrunch.
The only tangible part of this rumor is BoltJS, a user interface framework designed to help developers build mobile web apps, in HTML5 and JavaScript that run entirely in the browser, with no backend processing required. BoltJS is built on top of Javelin so that it does not duplicate code already present in the Facebook codebase and so that it is familiar for third-party Facebook developers.
The modules are defined using the CommonJS standard, ensuring each module is completely self-contained, with no global variables being created. There’s nothing linking the two projects right now, apart from the fact that it looks like BoltJS could be used to develop Project Spartan apps.
While the HTML5 apps originally only had to work on mobile Safari, meaning just iOS (the iPad, the iPhone, and the iPod touch) was targeted, both Android and desktop browsers are also a requirement now. Facebook is supposedly giving third-party developers a couple more weeks to tweak their apps. Furthermore, a separate event will give them more time to present.
These developers have been working for at least a couple of months with Facebook, and the social network put in a lot of time before that. Employed by companies such as Zynga and the Huffington Post, they are building apps for the platform that range from games to news-reading apps.
The broader goal is to get people using Facebook as the distribution model for apps, rather than Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market. The social networking giant wants this HTML5 app platform to succeed so the mobile world is not fully controlled by the two technology giants. Facebook would of course also love for its own payment platform to dominate mobile by allowing developers to sell apps and offer in-app purchases with Facebook Credits.
See also:
- BoltJS: the key to Facebook’s upcoming HTML5 apps platform?
- Rumor: Facebook, Apple to take on Google with HTML5 platform
- Rumor: Facebook to take on Apple with HTML5 platform
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: spamming apps are lame
- Facebook by mobile platform: iPhone first, Android second
- Facebook kills App Directory, wants users to search for apps
