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.

Another good article on this...

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/ [roughlydrafted.com] This is from Roughly Drafted.

Re:Roughly Drafted==Spam

Sorry, I don't keep up with the minute-by-minute Mac fanboy vs. Windows fanboy battles on the Intertron -- just linking to a relevant article on the subject at hand. I actually don't use Digg, so I have no idea about the history there. Some of Daniel's articles come off as a bit skewed, sure, but it's his blog and he's entitled to his opinion. Plus, is trying to get a few people to email Digg and Apple, which your linked blog article claims, the same as "spamming" it? Give me a break.

Supporter here

I was one of the ones who wrote. I'm a very real person, one who dislikes censorship of any form - the rest of you should be ashamed for promoting attacks on someone who is simply strongly opinionated. I am no minion or sock puppet, but someone concerned that very small groups are controlling most content that users see on digg, that kind of story inbreeding is really healthy for any site (and indeed on any given day you can see that over the years Digg frontpage story quality has dropped significantly).

I just wanted to throw in some words of support in the midst of the AC wasteland from people who can't even post with a real userID.

Re:Roughly Drafted==Spam

Wait a minute... Did you just post on a blog that some other blog doesn't like its competitor blog and that somehow this other blog is supposed to be able to decide which blogs are harmful to me? ...whiney fanboy indeed...

Re:Roughly Drafted==Spam

Rubbish.

Roughly Drafted is one of the better Apple blogs out there. I don't agree with everything the guy says, but it is original and interesting, unlike most Apple blogs, which are just rehashes of press releases (sadly much like the rest of the news).

But what will the code look like?

That's my question. I have seen too many apps that "help" you create websites but the code it generates is a mess. And if you want to integrate it with another app forget it.
For example where I work we were building a B2C app and instead of wasting coder time building the bla bla stuff around the real working site. They used go live and in the end we had to re-do it all.

Re:But what will the code look like?

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.

correction

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.

proprietary

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.

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.

Re:proprietary

Yea but, whats the point?

If things can be accomplished with COMPLETELY open and free (as in freedom) frameworks and languages, why choose Flash?

Re:proprietary

SproutCore is pretty impressive for building real JS web applications, although the story doesn't real end there.

There's a convergence of other improvements, such as HTML5, CSS, and SVG, that are filling a lot of the multimedia roles previously the domain of flash.

For example, WebKit already supports CSS transforms [webkit.org], gradients [webkit.org], client-side database storage [webkit.org], animation [webkit.org], HTML5 media [webkit.org], downloadable fonts [webkit.org], masks [webkit.org], reflections [webkit.org], etc.

A lot of these things are only available in WebKit right now, although they've all been proposed or will be proposed as web standards in the near future, and provide a nice glimpse at where the web is heading. Web 3.0 (or whatever marketing term people come up with) is clearly though going to be focused on multimedia.

Re:proprietary

You're missing the point... flash and silverlight require plugins to work in a web browser. Not only is this an extra install for the end user, it also means not all platforms and browsers will be supported (A great example being no flash/silverlight on the iPhone...) The nice thing about "SproutCore" is that is 100% based on web standards (HTML, XML, JavaScript, etc) and will work on any platform and in any browser that follows those standards out of the box, no plugins needed!

Re:proprietary

I look at Flash opening its specifications as an act of desperation by Adobe to save it from Silverlight. And I've tried Gnash, and to call it usable is a joke. I experienced a total of 1 or 2 websites that it actually worked with. Swfdec was a little better. And the youtube "working" (does it even seek yet?) is not some natural consequence of a decent flash player, but the result of specifically targeting it - and is highly unrepresentative of the rest of the web.

These days, I try not use flash (got flashblock) but for the times I need it, the official Adobe is installed. Perhaps when Silverlight gets released for linux, and developers start using it - Adobe will lift its game a bit.

lockin

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:lockin

I'm not sure why you brought it up, or why you had so much to say about so very little, but I'm sure that I speak for all of us when I say thank you. Truly a man for your time and place.

Apples and Oranges

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.

Re:Apples and Oranges

Flame/mod away, but it's true.

Now, there's no need for that, now is there? :)

I don't think anyone expects SproutCore to "kill" Flash in its current usage - mostly ads and multimedia. I think the claim is that SproutCore could kill Flash's aspirations (via AIR) to become a standard for building rich apps on the browser.

I mean, you have to admit that if you were considering building a rich app, and you were looking at all of the options... well, now Apple has some real rich apps working via javascript and Google has always had their javascript rich apps - at the very least it shows you that you can be successful while sticking with javascript.

280 North seems to have the same idea in mind.

It seems like the guys at 280 Slides [280slides.com] 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.

Re:There are many areas where Apple matters

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.

Re:There are 6 million iPhones out there

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.

Re:There are 6 million iPhones out there

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/apple_s_iphone_smashes_larger_market_on_web_video_music_usage [alleyinsider.com]

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.

Re:Web 2.0 exists because

Almost. The iPhone is the most viable portable (as in, in-pocket) mobile web platform out there right now. So much so, in fact, that I would say that the awkwardness in having to pinch and squeeze websites to view them is cancelled out by the convenience of having the web without lugging around a laptop.

Re:There are 6 million iPhones out there

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.

Re:There are many areas where Apple matters

I think "retard" is a little strong. Obviously you're not in MobileMe's target market, but there is an integration between Apple's products that makes things easier for those "retards" who don't mind paying money for having things handed to them instead of spending time digging around the internet like you (and I) do.

And any time someone brings something new and interesting to the web, especially something they're willing to open source, it's a positive thing.

It can use any backend

The author just happens to use Ruby on Rails, but you can use Java also (Apple is using WebObjects) or PHP ...