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Cocoa-Like JavaScript Framework Announced

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-coffee-names dept.

TwilightSentry writes "Ars Technica reports that a group of developers has created an Objective-C-like extension to JavaScript along with a class library mirroring Cocoa. They've used these to release an impressive demo app called 280 Slides. The article notes, 'Whereas SproutCore seeks to "embrace the platform" by giving a Cocoa-like development model for developers already using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make a web app, Cappuccino and Objective-J take an entirely different approach. "Since Cappuccino runs entirely on the client, at run time, we're never actually generating HTML or CSS," says Boucher. "When you build an application in Cappuccino, you don't need to ever deal with HTML or CSS. All of your interface is designed in Objective-J and Cappuccino. Cappuccino focuses on application architecture more than anything else, like building applications that know how to save and open documents, or copy and paste. We also built a powerful graphics engine into Cappuccino, so you can make rich applications like 280 Slides."' The developers plan to release the framework and preprocessor as open source. No mention is made of a specific license."

6 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Feh by FooAtWFU · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's probably true, but sometimes optimizing for programmers' convenience is more important than reducing every ounce of bloat to the bare minimum. RAM is cheap enough and reusable; programmers' time isn't either.

    If you're not trying to write a high-performance scalable computing cluster app, or an operating system, or a fancy computer game, then bloat really isn't an issue.

    --
    The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
  2. Re:Excellent! by cheesy9999 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    You managed to fit quite a lot FUD in one sentence.
    • Cappuccino and Objective-J aim to completely abstract away the inconsistencies of the browser DOM (JavaScript the language itself is fairly consistent across browsers)
    • Objective-J brings classical inheritance to JavaScript, which has much more familiar semantics to most people than JavaScript's prototypal inheritance
    • Regardless of Objective-C's syntax, have you seen some of the syntactical hoops JavaScript programmers jump through to get pseudo-classical inheritance? Just check out Crockford's JavaScript pages and his new book. There's about a half dozen different ways to do it, none of which I find particularly elegant.
    --
    -tom
  3. Re:SproutCore - it relies on ruby by aesiamun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Where can I download it?

    I keep hearing how phenomenal this is, but I can't find it and objective-j.org says 'coming soon'.

    Come, don't push a website if it doesn't exist.

  4. Re:Reinventing XUL... BADLY by rboucher · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Where exactly does it "Breaks in places in Firefox?" Let us know and we'll get right on it.

  5. Re:Impressions by GrahamCox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A lot of mediocre programmers seem to complain about Objective-C syntax and Cocoa and whatnot. I can tell you, after 14 years immersed in C++, Cocoa/Objective-C was a breath of fresh air. I picked up the language in about a day and the basics of Cocoa in a few more. Obviously getting really comfortable with it takes a while longer but after doing Cocoa solidly now for 5 years I'd find it very hard to give up. If you've yet to see the advantage then you're probably not doing anything seriously with it. The dynamic dispatch alone simplifies things in a way that C++ can only dream of.

    As for MFC, it's a total joke compared to what you can accomplish in Cocoa with a fraction of the code and with a result in another league in terms of stability and quality.

    I'm not a rabid fanboi or whatever I'll probably get accused of, but after using a number of languages and frameworks over the years (including developing my own general purpose framework in C++ for Mac) I can tell you that in my experience Cocoa is the best there is right now, and that has been the case for a while.

  6. Re:Impressive, but broken by Cato · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why would the browser need to tell you about a non-English input method? In my experience of I18N of web apps, this is completely unnecessary, since the input method is invisible to the application (rather like switching keyboard layouts) - all that's needed is for the web app to support Unicode etc. Since JavaScript uses Unicode natively, I can't quite see how 280 North has managed to break Unicode support like this.