I’ve been experimenting with the open source Cappuccino framework for a few days, and I gotta say it’s pretty extraordinary. I did a quick examination of it about 6 months back, but got busy with a few other things and never had time to revisit it until now.
If you don’t know what Cappuccino is, here’s the quick & dirty. Cappuccino takes a fresh new look at how you approach developing desktop-class web apps (think Google Maps, not NYTimes.com). You don’t really write JavaScript per se, you write the client side app code in Objective-J, which is a JavaScript port of Objective-C (you know, that language people develop iPhone and Mac apps in that looks like C). Not only have the guys over at 280 North managed to port Objective-C to the web, but they’ve ported Cocoa and AppKit; two great libraries from the Mac development world. Why is this so great? You do know how cool Mac and iPhone apps look, right?
One really fabulous thing about Cappuccino is that you don’t need to worry about html or css on the presentation front, that’s taken care of for you (granted you do need to know how to position the controls on the screen math wise, but I’ll take that over browser detection and its respective hacks any day). What I also really like about it is that it’s backend agnostic. I can hook up a RoR backend, or PHP (not that I would) or ASP.NET, Cappuccino just doesn’t care and I get to use whatever I’m strong with that will get the job done.
Now, if you’ve ever seen Objective-C you might be aware of the fact that it’s a very verbose language. It doesn’t assume much and really expects the developer to explicitly state just about everything. I don’t particularly love chatty languages. Well, "There’s an app for that" (I couldn’t resist)! 280 North, the same guys who invented Cappuccino, also are working on an IDE which includes an interface building app that will free you from a lot of the noise handcrafted ObjC/J exposes you to. It’s called Atlas, and it’s in beta testing as I write this. I signed up for the beta (which is currently Mac only, with Windows support expected soon). At the very same time I signed up and paid the nominal $20, my Mac decided to retire itself by way of a dead hard drive. Oh well. At least I can keep an eye on the beta forums for the Windows beta (and will of course update here with a preview). In the meantime, I’ll see what I can do without the Atlas IDE / interface builder.
Cappuccino has a lot going for it and in my opinion is certainly going to be the trend in how desktop-class web apps are developed. It really does just make sense and it’s an exciting time to be in the industry right now. Check out some links below to get started in doing your own preview of Cappuccino.
- Cappuccino.org – Open Source Application Framework.
- 280North – The folks who brought us Cappuccino.
- 280Slides – An example of what Cappuccino can help you build.
- Atlas – Cappuccino IDE in Beta.