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.

Comments

Re:There are many areas where Apple matters

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

lockin

[Speare]

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.

Re:There are 6 million iPhones out there

[catmistake]

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.