So now that we have a venue to open up some discussion, I wanted to share what our teams have been working on for the open source BlackBerry WebWorks project
There's LOTS of work happening around the open source project and below you will find the different areas that are in flight.
Re-branding - COMPLETED
[Delivered in v1.5.1]
At our BlackBerry Developer Conference we announced the new name for the platform where we are no longer calling the platform BlackBerry Widgets, but have now re-branded the platform BlackBerry WebWorks.
You will see that soon there will be a minor revision of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK, and the BlackBerry WebWorks Plug-ins. The only changes in these revisions is the fact that the new BlackBerry WebWorks branding is used throughout the product. We are also lining this up with re-branding efforts for the BlackBerry Developer Zone.
BlackBerry WebWorks on PlayBook Beta - COMPLETED
[Beta Released in Early Jan 2011]
We have an entire team bringing the BlackBerry WebWorks platform to the BlackBerry PlayBook. We are trying to get an initial beta out as quickly as possible. We'll also be uploading the WebWorks source code to github so that you can also contribute to the code-base used on the PlayBook.
Contributor Agreement & Roles - COMPLETED
See: https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks/wiki/How-To
We are currently working through finalizing the contributor agreements that will allow the community to contribute code to the project. As soon as we have the i's dotted and t's crossed we'll be posting more information on how to sign up to be a contributor to the project. We are also finalizing the definition of each of the roles that contributors can have such as reviewer, commiter etc.
Publish PlayBook WebWorks SDK to github - COMPLETED
See: https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks-TabletOS
Just like the WebWorks SDK for BlackBerry Smartphones, we are also pushing up all the code for the PlayBook WebWorks SDK into github. This means we need to put the final touches on source code headers and Apache 2 agreement.
Evacuating APIs - IN FINAL TESTING
[This should now be a matter of a couple weeks]
The first set of source code provided on github included the packager, the application template code and three new APIs. What it didn't include was the source code for the rest of the BlackBerry WebWorks APIs. This is because those APIs are currently built with the BlackBerry operating system and distributed with each new device build.
While this does give some advantages around application build size, it also comes with the disadvantage where the APIs can only be modified and distributed with new OS builds.
We currently have a team working on evacuating the existing BlackBerry WebWorks APIs off of the operating system and bringing them up into the open source project on github. This way all of the source code for the entire platform will be available to the the community. We will also be able to make changes, fixes, additions to this code much more frequently and will not be tied to operating system releases
PlayBook WebWorks SDK RTM
We are continuing to work on various additions to the WebWorks SDK for PlayBook and will be having a series of releases leading up to the release of the BlackBerry PlayBook. This includes added core functionality and the addition of new APIs.
Builds and Testing
When we first posted the source code to github we knew we still had work to do to get everything to where we wanted it to be. We wanted to make sure that we had the source code available and people could get started, but we have more to come.
We have teams pulling together build scripts and testing frameworks built on open technologies so that you will be able to download the project, configure your environment, build the code and run the test suites. No internal RIM sauce needed 
we want to ensure we are enabling the community to be successful using open standard frameworks.
Platform SDKs
We are also working with each of the platform SDK teams such as payment, advertising, BBM etc to ensure that these great services will be available for the BlackBerry WebWorks platform.
New BlackBerry Smartphone JavaScript APIs
We are scoping and starting work on some new JavaScript APIs to add to the SDK. We will be providing the JavaScript interface definitions on this forum to allow the community to see what we are planning and what the API signatures will look like.
Well, we now have the source code for WebWorks on Tablet OS available in github:
We're working on the finishing touches on the Contributor agreement page before uploading it.. it should be any time now. We've been waiting until the Contributor agreement page is there before blogging about having the source available
We also have a list of the APIs that are currently being worked on on the Smartphone platform:
https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks/wiki/Enhanc
And we try and keep our roadmaps as up to date as possible:
Tablet OS: https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks-TabletOS/wi
Smartphone: https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks/wiki/Roadma
Actually the contributor agreements just went live
https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks-TabletOS/wi
