HP continues to divulge bits and pieces of a road map for the ill-starred and nearly-orphaned webOS. The company has followed up its December plan to release webOS mobile platform and development tools with a proposed timeline, with a full release set before year’s end.  Some people see a life for the associated Enyo JavaScript framework aside from any success or failure webOS ultimately achieves.

Shim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic – this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited.

The shim, once loaded in a device’s browser, opens and maintains a socket connection to the server, according to to Shim’s developers. Shim was written in 2011 by Chris Marstall, Creative Technologist at the Boston Globe. The software has been open sourced. Write the Shim originators on git.hub:

Whenever a new page is requested, the page’s URL is broadcast to all connected browsers, which then redirect themselves to that URL, keeping all devices in sync. Shim info is available on git.hub.