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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.
I think the iPhone would disagree there. Pretty much as long as Apple refuses to put Flash on the iPhone, anything iPhone-friendly will have to be some flavor of HTML. The fact that it would also work well on Linux is a bonus.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I started writing on DOS. (I won't count the Apple ][.) Wrote for PDP-11s. Wrote for Windows. Wrote for SGI GL (before OpenGL). Each new platform was yet another paradigm, yet another set of non-portable libraries or techniques.
I like POSIX, and I like portable languages and toolkits that I can take from platform to platform. I like writing little graphical apps or command-line tools in Perl, Python, GTK, SDL, OpenGL that I can run on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, or even my Nokia N810. All the knowledge is transferrable, all the benefits of the little tools are transferrable with a little work to smooth out details like widget placement or font decisions.
I never bothered to get deep into Objective C, because while it's theoretically transferrable, it is really just used to write for the Apple Carbon/Cocoa/Core/Whatever/Don'tNitPickItsJustAnExample* stack. Same went for DirectX on Windows when I still wrote software for Windows. I would like to make apps that do whizzy things with Core Animation or whatever, but I just can't make myself get excited at the prospect of learning yet another vendor-lockin technology. The hardware-accelerated compositing is cool, the effortless scripting of visual objects is interesting, but not interesting enough to actually learn something that won't be portable.
If I really want a visual effect like Core This or Direct That, I will write a portable library to do it in OpenGL on Python or something. Or if the need isn't extreme, I'll just wait for someone else to write the general library if it ever happens.
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No, it's intentional. Think of it as a Rorschach test for your opinion on Apple. Putting in “from” means pro-Apple. Putting in “from not” is the opposite. As it is, I think we all know which category you fall in. No wonder you posted anonymously.
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.
just Fyi, I, and roughly a million others (probably more) have been loading binary apps on iPhone for a year or so. Some of these apps, such as the package manager, rely on HTML... and every so often they update and it gets even slicker. I really can't understand what you mean by 'inconvenient,' when it seems the whole point of webapps is precisely for convenience.
The Admin and the Engineer
I definitely agree...but some things just can't be done in javascript. If you need more performance, video/audio, real tcp/ip socket connections (not that crazy 'comet' hack, or wasteful polling), zlib compression, even if you want to rotate an image to an arbitrary degree on the client with antialiasing, then you need flash. Java applets take too long to load, even though the runtime performance is usually better than flash. Flash has the advantage over Silverlight of install base. SVG has limited browser support & limited features compared to Flash.
Unfortunately there's really no other choice if you want to build certain types of (buzzword alert!) "Rich Media Applications".
More on-topic: This ScriptCore looks like Yet Another Javascript Framework (YAJF?). Some choices seem particularly odd, such as choosing to reimplement buttons through javascript code instead of using native browser widgets. And they say it's iPhone-compatible, but oddly one of their demo pages caused my Java VM plugin to start up! I'm not sure what it's being used for though.
sig? uhh, umm, ok
According to real statistics, well over 80% of iPhone users "use more than ten functions," and even more use Safari for browsing. That's why the phone has a majority share (~75%) of mobile website traffic in stats despite "only" taking 27% of the new phones sold in the US and only having been on the market for a year.
Web development is for the web, not targeted at the iPhone. Whether or not key customers can view your content is a big deal. iPhone users will have more impact than their numbers suggest, just as Mac users do.
The fact that this also benefits Linux users is just a nice finish.
"If things can be accomplished with COMPLETELY open and free (as in freedom) frameworks and languages, why choose Flash?" The key word in that sentence may be the first.... ;-)
(The original story seemed strange to me... many screenfuls of text, with the elevator pitch seeming to be "One particular JavaScript Framework will Rule The World -- *if* it's from Apple!" The weblogs didn't show much skepticism today, so I'm glad to see some realistic questioning here at Slashdot.)
jd/adobe
After reading a bit about this, it sounds like something similar to Google's GWT (with Gears), except that SproutCore uses Ruby instead of Java.
How do the two compare?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Actually if you look at the (very minimal) docs on sproutcore.com, it runs out of a Rails app server.
But otherwise it looks like a front-end toolkit, so its not clear to me how much it actually depends on RoR.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Actually it seems to generate all the HTML (not sure if that's what the grandparent meant by 'code'), including re-implementing standard browser widgets.
Just taking a glace at it, I agree that it would be difficult to integrate sproutcore with an exisitng web app, its really an entirely different approach.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Also-to add to the above. I pay for .Mac (soon to be MobileMe)
it gives me auto synced mail, bookmarks, contacts, storage, gallery etc etc for the aforementioned price. being a contractor, every hour I'm not working is an hour I'm not making money. now at $75/hr exactly how many hours do you think I need to spend finding/configuring these other services that "do exactly the same" over a year, before I'm worse off, from a purely financial point of view.. i'll give you a hint: it's not many.
What is...?
If it helps to get the retards to pay $100 per year for a set of services they can get elsewhere for free,
.me? To manage them?
.me a cost of exactly 1 hour of my time. Strikes me as a good deal less than I'd sink into replicating it with "free" services.
How long does it take you to find those services? To integrate them all to the convenience level provided by
I currently bill out at $100/hr, which makes
If you're not worth that much, or if you choose to not optimize your time as sensible people do -- that being the only absolutely limited resource there is! -- I respectfully submit that it is you, and not worthwhile people, who is the retard.