I just found out about Cappuccino and Objective-J. It looks very interesting. Definitely worth a look for application development on the web. Sometimes the web browser IS an okay platform for interactive applications.

@Charles Lawrence
@Warren
My worry is not that the web browser was not built for this. Increasingly this is not the case (see Chrome for an example). However, this entirely defeats the concept of Semantic web. This is what would make Tim Berners Lee cringe today. And he’d be right.

The big problem with things like this is that hacks and PHBs will see “ooh shiny”, and use it for entirely inappropriate projects. Like mostly static pages. In addition to making the pages bloated and slow, this will make them entirely in-accessible to screen-readers and text-based browsers, as well as search engines and other data miners/indexers.

I haven’t looked too deeply yet, but another concern is using URLs for state-saving. The web is a place for URL-based bookmarks, and if people can’t use their ‘Back’ button, they get antsy.

webbrowsers are no more just “document readers”, they have many services for developpers : canvas, multi-thread, garbage collectors, local databases, network services, secure authentification, and so on.

At time, yes, one framework should be include in all browsers. it will be an ugly wars.

the same than anyone trying to do the same bypassing the HUGE work already put in the browsers.

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to be clear : javascript and your opera/safari/ie8/firefox is NO MORE just a html reader.

they are complete virtual environment with many applications services ready to be used.

they are THAT os, and the one with the most companies involved in it. More than the original vision of Java, more than flex, more than whatever the ONE company Microsoft can do.

it’s not a short term hack . Javascript is no more an hack.

its time is not coming to end, the recent google announcement or mobileme by apple clearly shows it’s only the beginning

As Computer Scientist I say it’s a LOT better than we had yesterday and the future is promising. Just think about all HTML 5 will bring in fact in standard services inside the browser, not simply new tags.

What developers (and users) want is a multi-platform, application environment that allows you to run applications on whatever computer you happen to be using, requiring no install.

A web browser seems to provide this… cross-platform rendering (via HTML/CSS) and automatic install via JavaScript. But it’s a hack. From the user’s point of view, they browse to a web site where they might expect to find a document, but instead they find an application that really breaks the document metaphor they are used to dealing with. And developers have to deal with a single-threaded run-time that doesn’t really work the same across multiple browsers and provides no advanced UI library (hence all of the different JavaScript UI frameworks which make applications’ UI inconsistent across apps).

But imagine if we had an OS that allowed users to run applications just by clicking on them through a web app browser or within a roaming favorites folder. And imagine that OS allowed developers to create applications in a multi-threaded environment that could be run directly from servers without having to install anything. This is what someone should be working on. Perhaps this is what Microsoft’s Midori is trying to do.

But this idea of the browser as application run-time environment is a short-term hack whose time is certainly come to an end. As computer scientists, we can do a lot better than this.

in fact, obj-J is not the most important part, it’s the framework : cappucino, mimicking Cocoa, simply the best, coherent, readable and well-thought application framework available now.

objective-C was not what you crave in os X, it’s Cocoa. Cocoa is possible thanks to the dynamical runtime of objective-C but in the end, it’s all about Cocoa.

Thanks to 280 north if they succeed to bring Cappucino to the level of Cocoa.

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(I also tried sproutcore, it’s an other framework trying to bring really good mvc cocoa-like framework to the web. It’s really totally a desktop-like application development, and way ahead of flash mx, air or simply plain actionscript/javascript)

it’s not about language, it’s about Application Framework !

Also, have you ever driven on 101N vs. 280N when driving from Silicon Valley to San Francisco?

101 is an industrial wasteland and often a parking lot. Most of 280 is along state parks, and almost always running smoothly.
http://maps.goo...mp;t=h&z=11

It’s a pleasure to drive on 280 North.

I was thinking Cappuccino could be used to paint OpenSocial apps. I am implementing the RESTful API on the new PHPSocialize social networking platform with Apache Shindig.

I thought it would have been cool to have an online or Desktop GUI for people to EASILY build apps for PHPSocialize, perhaps using Cappuccino as a library. It’s still an option. I just have to see if I can understand the libraries to modify them.

All LGPL code, modified or not I include will be available as a free zip in a direct download and will not be packaged with the main code in the paid download.

Cappuccino applications can certainly be embedded in iframes (see the embedded presentation here: http://www.tech...ote-280-slides/ ), and with some work possibly directly on the page, but then you have issues of sandboxing and whatnot.

Yeah, there isn’t any refreshing for most widgets, I wasn’t implying that. I would just like it if each Cappuccino application were encapsulated into a DOM element like Flash is. Not to refresh it, but so they could be hosted on social network profiles and so there could be multiple applications open at once.

Otherwise what’s the point of having it in a browser? They could use AIR.

That’s not what I want then, I was hoping it was like Flash where there would be a bounding box for each Cappuccino app on the page, where you could mix regular HTML DOM and many cappuccino apps, and have access to the page as a namespace in the API like flash.

That would be the ultimate JS windowing system. YUI is ok, but it doesn’t cut it as an application building platform.

Maybe since it’s LGPL, somebody can encapsulate it into a DOM container, then create a Desktop tool for GUI creation like VB or Flash CS3. That would be awesome. So many more JS apps would come out if somebody did that and they could make $$$ big time.

As for the Page and DOM, Cappuccino apps aren’t page based. They’re single page, load once, and do all your stuff applications. No refreshing, in other words.

And, when you program in Cappuccino, you don’t ever interact with the DOM. Instead, you interact with CPViews and the view architecture. This solves all the cross platform DOM issues, and lets you learn one less technology at the same time.

“You can never make a JS application that’s as awesome as ActiveX. If you could it would be refreshing. People share the Adobe Flash OSX to do that, but still, a JS one as powerful as that would rule.”

I type too fast sometimes, I am coding in Eclipse behind this window almost at the same time.

Is it Page aware? Do you have flash like functions like getURL() and stuff to pull the CSS out of the container page? Where it abstracts styleSheet.cssRules and styleSheet.rules into 1 function?

Is there a namespace to manipulate the DOM behind too?

I’m just wondering how robust it is?

The ultimate would be a JS library that would emulate what you can do with ActiveX except for the accessing machine resources. ActiveX apps were the ultimate in control except all the signing and security issues.
You can never make a JS application that’s as awesome as ActiveX. That would be refreshing. I people share the Adobe Flash OSX to do that, but still, a JS one as powerful as that would rule.

Have you considered expanding your JS windowing library into a Flash MX like desktop creation tool where you could compile the code into 1 line of JS and use it against your library?

To kind of mimic flash studio with JS and w/o the ActiveX boxes?

@Chris You can in fact draw directly inside a View by overriding the drawRect: method in any CPView. It’s super simple to start drawing, without having to worry about creating your own canvas elements, or dealing with cross browser drawing compatibilities.

The documentation on this features isn’t great right now, but hopefully we’ll have some more examples up soon.