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re: Mouseover not working with touchscreen devices: HTML5 won't solve that problem. Both HTML5 and Flash apps need to be written with the tap=click no hover paradigm.

Steve & HTML5 pundits are presenting a false problem that their solution (HTML5) does not fix by itself. The solution to the mouseover problem is simply the same for both HTML5 and Flash.

What's more, HTML5 has no native support for multi-touch which newer touch-screen devices have (well, there's Sproutcore but it doesn't work everywhere). Flash 10.1 has support for both tmulti-touch and mouse gestures.

It's called SproutCore.

but there are 3 (that I can name!) next generation javascript frameworks that may help:

GWT -- google's java to javascript translator.

Sproutcore -- Apple is using it for .Mac

Cappuccino -- more or less complete reimplementation of Cocoa via objective javascript

I'll also mention OpenLazlo, though I haven't paid any attention to it, so I don't know the internals.

The reason you have to use "tricks" as you call them, is because some browsers have not implemented the standards properly. The reason you don't have to deal with that in Flex and Silverlight is because they are proprietary environments running within the browser. These plug-ins handle the rendering, not the browser. I understand what you are saying, and I agree that JavaScript could be more robust, but I think the reason it's not there now is because a few companies (or one) have been holding it back for awhile. It's been a good 10 years since we've seen major advances in HTML and Javscript. I'm excited that there's a chance that people are finally starting to take notice again. Hopefully this means that it will start to evolve more and perhaps take care of some of your concerns.

BTW: Have you checked out http://www.sproutcore.com/?

I'm working on a GWT framework for the iphone that will allow you to write a web application

Perhaps something like SproutCore or Cappuccino or PhoneGap?

(Not that there's anything wrong with a new project. :) Just wanted to make sure you knew. )

A web app can get surprisingly close to being indistinguishable for native thanks to a few features in MobileSafari like:

This is true, and it's one of the reasons Apple tried to get people to swallow the "The Web is your Dev Kit" line.

It's also funny how people overlook this when they start griping about how venal and/or controlling Apple is.

I can't help but think that all of these JavaScript/AJAX libraries keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. How many grid widgets written in JavaScript do we really need? How many toolkits for a progress bar or a div-based dialog box have to be developed? Is one of them really that compelling over the others. Consider:

http://dojotoolkit.org/ - DoJo Toolkit
http://www.activewidgets.com/ - ActiveWidgets
http://www.prototypejs.org/ - Prototype
http://script.aculo.us/ - Scriptaculous
http://jquery.com/ - jQuery
http://extjs.com/ - Ext JS
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ - YUI
http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/ - Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
http://www.sproutcore.com/ - SproutCore

Those are just the ones I have used personally. It's getting ridiculous. Personally, I like the approach GWT has, but of course that's only relevant to the java developers of the world. I'd love to see all of these "widgets" be compatible with one another.

http://www.sproutcore.com/

I don't know about the person you're responding to, but I found the mention of Ruby on the Sproutcore Hello World Tutorial (bolded for emphasis):
"If you haven't yet installed SproutCore, it's really easy if you have Ruby installed on your machine."

"Note that if you are on a Mac, you will need the developer tools installed as well for Ruby to work."

did you get linked to the same links that the post linked me to!?...

Just to make sure, here's all the links that the post refers to:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/16/apples_open_secret_sproutcore_is_cocoa_for_the_web.html
http://www.sproutit.com/
http://www.sproutcore.com/
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080530/0022021266.shtml


...I read the article as linked, and just to make sure, I ran some text searches across them, and neither "ruby" or "rails" came up in the article content. From a goodly amount of reading, I didn't come across Rails being put forward as the big platform choice to warrant the tagging. So once again... the ruby/rails crowd seem to be shills, or at least certainly eager to grass-roots their little world into existence; because a packaging system isn't enough to be tagging the article as if it's the main technology.

or not http://www.sproutcore.com/ Site Temporarily Unavailable We apologize for the inconvenience. Please contact the webmaster/ tech support immediately to have them rectify this. error id: "bad_httpd_conf"

The photo gallery demo on SproutCore.com fails to work on Opera - the right photo pane not even rendering. Although Opera isn't widely used, with its exceptional standards-compliance it's a great barometer for how compatible something may ultimately be.

It's an interesting idea, and maybe I'm missing the "awesomeness" of it, but I don't find a compelling reason to switch to this over a standard development stack. It just seems as though it's a highly widgetized javascript framework, running on ruby.

I develop in Rails and C#, and I'd just as soon use jQuery and it's host of extensions to build my own application like widgets that I could use across any backend.

I've looked through the documentation and I'm hoping I'm just missing something about SproutCore's awesomeness.