It seems there’s some sort of new web development framework released every week or two but the other day I found one that shows a lot of promise: Sproutcore.
Odd name but an interesting concept. At the most recent WWDC (Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference), Sproutcore was revealed as the “engine” behind many of the new services on Apple’s .Mac replacement (MobileMe). Many are suggesting the real purpose is an open-source, plugin-free alternative to Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s SilverLight. If you’re interested in how something like Sproutcore fits in with cloud computing, Google, Flash, and the future, you should read the “Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore” post on Roughly Drafted from June 14th.
From the Sproutcore site:
What is SproutCore?
SproutCore is a framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code. It can help you build full “thick†client applications in the web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data.
I spent an hour or so working through the “hello world” demo and it’s cool. You do development coding in Ruby with an interactive server process that simplifies the code-test-debug-code cycle. When done, there’s a standalone SproutCore utility that converts everything into static Javascript and CSS files—ready for deployment under Apache or whatever. Here’s my ‘production’ version of the demo:
I tested the look on both Windows (Firefox and IE7) and Mac (Firefox 3) and for this simple demo, at least, rendering was identical across platforms. I think this is going to be a framework to watch. It’s open source, doesn’t rely on plugins, is reasonably platform neutral (I’ve seen implementations on Ubuntu and Windows boxes) and relies on basic internet standards (Javascript and CSS).