While the iPhone dominates the smartphone market and Android is improving by leaps and bounds, there are other platforms out there that may surprise us with some elegant solutions in coming years. RIM and Nokia are the big players in the game and Nokia just replaced its CEO with a senior Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop. It is no surprise considering that the largest smartphone maker in the world still does not have a compelling touchscreen smartphone.

But there is another big player lurking in the shadows that may come out with some very surprising products soon. With the acquisition of Palm, HP, the largest PC maker, has bet big on the smartphone market. And the key here is the webOS. Its elegant architecture and intuitive UI are what make it all so interesting.

The development of the second generation of the platform is going at full speed. Just a few days ago, HP announced an early developer release of webOS 2.0 which comes with a slate of new features, including JavaScript Services, which means that not only webOS apps, but also services can be written entirely in JavaScript, deprecating the need for Java runtime. If you have read my last rant, I am particularly interested in the Node.js framework. And this particular framework now powers JavaScript Services for webOS 2.0. This is a further shift away from standard C/C++/Java and towards JavaScript.

If HP succeeds with upcoming smartphone products and builds a healthy app ecosystem, the role of JavaScript will be further expanded. It is no longer a scripting language living inside your browser. JavaScript is quickly becoming a universal language that is everywhere – from your browser to your phone OS to big iron on the server-side.