

An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino - bomberstudios
http://ajaxian.com/archives/an-interview-with-280-north-on-objective-j-and-cappuccino

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yan
280North guys did what I always thought would be an awesome and useful
undertaking and implemented it better than I thought could be done. I am
talking about ObjectiveJ/Cappuccino specifically, but 280Slides is a whole
different story. Everything runs snappy and I don't remember last time I was
so impressed with so few people's worth of work.

I can see a lot more being done in this direction, but I am just in awe in how
well this was done so far in the time they had.

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andreyf
Why did you chose to do Objective-J -> JS processing in the browers? For sake
of speed, wouldn't it be a good idea to do it server-side and then just serve
the JS?

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boucher
Actually, we use both methods. You can preprocess the code ahead of time if
you want, and serve content that way. We do this for our core frameworks
(AppKit and Foundation). Most of our application code is not preprocessed
though. One of the benefits of being able to run without having to "compile"
(which is essentially what having to preprocess ahead of time is) is that you
have a much more dynamic development environment. You can change code, hit
refresh, and see your changes immediately reflected, instead of compiling and
waiting.

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yan
Did you guys implement proper message passing and proxying, or are they ad-hoc
method calls?

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tlrobinson
We do indeed do dynamic dispatch, just like Objective-C.

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nickb
Guys, great job!

I have a question about timelines... how long was Obj-J in development and how
long did it take you to develop 280slides? I remember reading that you started
in 2005...

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tlrobinson
Thanks. Yes, Obj-J/Cappuccino was started while we were in college in 2005,
but was put on hold for awhile when we had other jobs. 280 Slides was written
in about 5 months, concurrently with some work on Cappuccino.

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smanek
Does anyone know where I can read more technical details about Objective-J or
Cappuccino?

This sounds pretty impressive so far ..

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andr
Does it work on the iPhone?

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boucher
Short answer: yes. Long answer: There's still some work to do.

