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Apple's SproutCore, OSS Javascript-Based Web Apps
99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "AppleInsider is running an article about Apple's new SproutCore Web application development framework, utilizing Javascript and some nifty HTML 5 to offer a 'Cocoa-inspired' way to create powerful Web applications. Apple built on the OSS SproutIt framework developed for an online e-mail manager called 'Mailroom.' Apple used this framework to build their new Web application suite (replacing .Mac) called MobileMe. Since SproutCore applications rely on JavaScript, it seems Apple had good reason to focus on Squirrelfish for faster JavaScript interpretation in Webkit. Apple hosted a session last Friday at WWDC introducing SproutCore to developers, but obviously NDAs prevent developers from revealing the details of that presentation. Apple has a chance here to keep the Web becoming even more proprietary as Silverlight and Flash battle it out to lock the Web application market into one proprietary format or another. Either way, this is a potential alternative, which should make the OSS crowd happy." TechDIrt's writeup on the browser evolving towards acting as an OS expands on the theme AppleInsider raises.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/ This is from Roughly Drafted.
You've linked to Roughly Drafted - the site that was caught trying to spam digg.
Roughly Drafted is poorly written & not credible. Please don't link to it - as the unofficial apple weblog puts it:If you're an Apple fan - don't link to RD; that website actually hurts, rather than helps Apple.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
You can get "some" services which are "similar" to .mac for free.
But not all of them and not in the same way.
There are a number of nuances that can not be completely replicated by the free alternatives and they certainly will not be as tightly integrated into the OS and into 3rd party apps that run on the OS.
Sorry, but you're dismissing some things you don't know everything about.
And calling people retards certainly does not help your case.
I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of this. It's not an application that generates code for you. It's an application framework, like Cocoa is for the native OSX environment, which provides simple abstracted access to do certain tasks via APIs. This just allows application developers to spend less time worrying about "under the hood" code to make things cross-browser compatible and so forth.
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
It's not true that Flash is completely proprietary. There are multiple open-source compilers, and there's an open-source browser plugin. You do have to work hard to develop in flash using an OSS software stack, but there are people doing it. Gnash, the open-source browser plugin, has gotten to the point where it can play you-tube videos, provided you have the right hardware and sacrifice an unblemished calf. Adobe has also been slowly moving in the right direction as far as open-sourcing some of their code, and relaxing some of the more onerous licensing restrictions. A lot of the problems with making flash more open are actually problems with codecs, and that situation is also showing signs of improving, with support for less patent-encumbered codecs being added to newer versions of flash.
Find free books.
From TFA, SproutCore is basically a rich set of JavaScript libraries. Flame/mod away, but it's true.
Flash/Silverlight don't only contain the same app struts for you to build upon, but they are also incredibly powerful application hosting frameworks with rich graphics and multimedia libraries to go beyond what HTML can render.
Comparing SproutCore to Flash and especially Silverlight is nonsense. Saying it's a Flash/Silverlight killer is delusional.
using System.Awesome;
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/apple_s_iphone_smashes_larger_market_on_web_video_music_usage
The most important thing about the iPhone isn't the sleek design, the touchscreen, iTunes integration, or any other single feature. It's the way that people use the device. Specifically, it's that people actually use it to do stuff besides making phone calls. Examples:
Almost 85% of iPhone owners browse the Web on their phones, versus 58% of the U.S. smartphone market and 13.1% of the overall U.S. mobile market, according to mobile research firm M:Metrics.
Some 31% of iPhone owners watch mobile TV or video, like Google's (GOOG) built-in YouTube software, compared to 4.6% of the overall market.
About 20% of iPhone owners access Facebook, versus 1.5% of the overall market.
And 74% of iPhone owners listened to music on their phones, compared to 28% of the smartphone market and 6.7% of the overall market.
Even if the usage is overstated that's still a hell of a lot of mobile Internet users.
The iPhone isn't like a regular smartphone. Rather than trying to supplement an experience for someone with existing shitty expectations of the big boy Internet on mobile devices, it's trying to broadly appeal to the market and it's becoming a catalyst that is literally changing the dynamics of the mobile data market.
Saying that people will be loading binary apps will kill off web development is like saying Web 2.0 is pointless because we all have Windows.
Sorry that's not true and you know it.
Over a thousand of my readers wrote Digg to ask it to stop censoring my articles (and cc:ed me) after a small contingent of Digg users complained that I was poking at their Xbox, Zune, and Windows Enthusiast views.
Digg has never accused me of creating scores of accounts, and some anonymous blog entry is not "credible evidence."
Promoting articles I write by submitting them to sites designed for that purpose is not spam.
Posting anon 'cause i mod'ed here. SproutCore uses ruby for its installer and for its server (at least for its test server.)
SproutCore doesn't write the code for you. It simply abstracts the low-level stuff (like calling XHttpRequest directly) to a higher level so you can just call: drag_and_drop(Object) and it will do all the backend stuff for you.
did you get linked to the same links that the post linked me to!?...
...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.
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
> is ruby really that lame that people are tagging unrelated articles to grassroots this bitch into existence?
I personally tagged ruby in there because the project owner did the same,
see: http://code.google.com/p/sproutcore
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
I'm pretty surprised no one has mentioned ExtJS, another VERY full-featured JS interface library. SproutCore is super young in comparison, it looks like, but it will be interesting to see how it advances. ExtJS has kind of a clinical look to it, and customizing the widgets looks like a pain, but the framework is definitely robust.
Limina.Log
The author just happens to use Ruby on Rails, but you can use Java also (Apple is using WebObjects) or PHP ...
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
taking 27% of the new phones sold in the US
Wrong
The iphone took about 2.5% (you were off by an order of magnitude). Don't get me wrong, this figure is very impressive for a new entry to the mobile market, but falsely inflating figures just makes you look stupid.
Or perhaps you don't know the difference between 'phone' & 'smartphone'?
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It seems like the guys at 280 Slides have been working on something similar. They have an Apple background and called their language Objective-J, from what I can tell it's an extension on JavaScript in a similar manner to way Objective-C is to C. Their Cocoa like framework on Objective-J is called Cappuccino.
Now I don't know if SproutCore is anything like what they are doing (wasn't at WWDC so I don't know the details), but the end goals of both projects seem like the same thing. A language and framework where whatever you make should just work across browsers. It's very early days for both, so we will have to see. From the article it seems like SproutCore is going to be fairly open. The 280 North guys seem like they want something similar for Objective-J and Cappuccion but they are still working on cleaning up the frameworks.
Either way, the competition should be good and hopefully bring sanity to the client side scripting world.
I'm sure he was talking about smartphones because that number accurately describes the iPhone's sales compared to other smart phones in the USA.
Apple is also working on getting CSS transformations into the CSS standard. This will allow you to do to your arbitrary image rotations with only CSS and you can control it with javascript by just setting the element's style attribute. They're also working on CSS animations and transitions to bring Core Animation like effects to the web browser. Check out the Webkit nightlies if you want to see it for yourself. It's quite impressive and easy to use. Hopefully it'll be supported by more than just Webkit soon.
Similarly, The Dojo Toolkit is a very strong JS library/toolkit/framework/whatever. I'm interning at WebEx, and I've been doing almost all my work with it. It's been a joy to use, especially for someone like me who has otherwise struggled with more complicated JavaScript.
I'm still waiting for Opera to add simple border-radius support. I thought Opera 9.5 would finally add it, but sadly it didn't.
So it's square corners for Opera and IE6/IE7. I'm not patching things up via SVG to have round corners in Opera.
What in particular is an Objective-C convention? I didn't look really closely, but most of the features they're talking about, such as MVC, bindings, etc. aren't limited to ObjC. They're mostly older techniques that ObjC lifted from other languages.
I've got an n800. Trust me - you do not want to compare the actual web browsing experience.
microb was a big step forward, and I hear it's getting ever better in the dev builds. But even with the bigger screen and higher resolution, the act of browsing the web is more awkward on an NIT than the pan-n-zoom iPhone. Even on an NIT you need to pan and zoom a great deal. However, it's not optimized for that kind of use, and switching zoom levels and scrolling about is a choppy experience.
The Flash support is also largely theoretical; the device has neither the horsepower nor the video bandwidth to actually handle a flash file of any complexity. If you let it fully buffer a youtube video, it does 'ok'. If you save off smaller flash games to the internal memory, then dump the browser and play the files directly, it can do some files passably. But it's not the experience anyone thinks of when you say 'flash support'. It's the kind of experience that makes me disable the flash plugin because it's a net negative on the act of browsing.
And the points below about the horrible UI in general are sadly accurate. The Nokia Internet Tablets are still heavily stylus-focused, awash with lazy desktop-style interfaces, with a disappointing half-effort toward finger support. Don't get me wrong: I love having a stylus. I love being able to sketch, doodle and jot with accuracy. I just don't want the device to assume its presence means they can ask me to drag it out every time I need to choose between 'Ok' and 'Cancel'. Nor do I want the apps to assume that since it's there, they can load up every screen with tiny buttons, checkboxes, etc.
As the devices stand today - there's no contest. For a handful of geeks, the NITs are wildly superior devices. For everyone else, they're a mess; a promising mess, but a mess none-the-less. And a mess that Nokia doesn't seem to know what to do with.
Here's to hoping that their Trolltech acquisition means good things. But after comparing maemo's last two years to the iPhone's last one -- I have little reason to believe the NITs will ever be better browsing devices for the average user than the iPhone at any given point in time -- despite its advertised java and flash support.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
well... right above the code I think you are looking at, is the line:
console.log("This browser does not support HTML5 client side storage. Will proceed with fixture data.") ;
It looks like the SQL is run on the client side, which is not the same security risk as if it was run server side, where it would most certainly be bad.
SproutCore was built while SproutIT developed Mailroom. Mailroom was launched in February 2006 (Interview with Charles Jolley, SproutIt.com).
...
So the core is much older and tested rather well. The only thing that's new is the hype
Btw. The Ars Technica article on SproutCore is good as well SproutCore: rich web apps in JavaScript, no Flash needed
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel