

Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche leave Engine Yard to work on SproutCore - _pius
http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/engine-yard-alumni-grows-bon-voyage-carlhuda/

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briandoll
Yehuda's post on his leaving graciously tells the tale of his work over the
last three years and gives plenty of nods to the folks who have worked by his
side.

<http://yehudakatz.com/2010/09/14/heres-to-the-next-3-years/>

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scotth
Has anyone tried out Sproutcore on a semi-serious/serious project? I've
browsed their source and it looks well-written. I'd love to hear people's
experiences.

~~~
paulitex
Sure. I'm 4 months in of fulltime work on a Sproutcore-based app that is the
basis of our startup - we haven't yet launched so I can't point you to it yet
unfortunately but I can give you my experiences. In a nutshell:

pros: friendly and helpful community, a number of things that 'just work' and
a vocally espoused observers paradigm for wiring up your app that, when it
works, is very nice and tidy. Very readable and well documented code base
(I've read well over 50% of the codebase now, keep it open in a window all
day). Can look very impressive in demos. Deals pretty well with most browsers
and platforms (particularly iOS friendly).

cons: Compared to Rails, jQuery, etc... a relatively small community and not a
lot of examples to learn from. The wiki is really hit-or-miss and the codebase
is pretty much the only reliable source of documentation. Some of the features
feel half-baked and like 'some person's pet project'. Some things _don't_
'just work' and can require a lot of hacking (not in the good way). The build
tools are a little slow, which adds 15 seconds or so to every reload (which I
do many many times every day, it adds up). Refactoring is a real pain
(especially compared to our backend, written in java using eclipse), there
just aren't that many tools. That's true of most javascript, but the
sproutcore build tools add some 'macros' to javascript (like sc_require();)
that really confuse the javascript refactoring tools that do exist.

~~~
rbxbx
So refactoring is difficult due to the way in which you interact with
Sproutcore's API, or because of a lack of refactoring tooling? The two are
completely different. Refactoring != Tooling.

~~~
paulitex
That's true, I shouldn't mix up the two - the real complaint is about the
tooling, but it's in refactoring tasks that I really feel it. For example, say
I want to rename a class: If I'm in java/eclipse I can command-option-R, type
the name, and press enter. Total time about 2 seconds. If I'm in sproutcore I
have to search/replace the whole project searching for references which takes
minutes and is tedious.

The reason it is difficult is because you can't use any of js tools that
leverage a js interpreter - your code isn't valid until it's run through the
sproutcore build system (which, as previously mentioned, is pretty slow).

~~~
aneth
That is pretty much standard in dynamic languages, including Ruby and Python.
It's what I miss most about strongly typed languages, like Java and Scala.

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swombat
All the top dogs seem to be leaving EngineYard, no?

~~~
some1else
That't too bad yeah :-/

I stalked Ezra at everything he wrote about deployment back in the day, and I
really dug Yehuda for his awesome skill and hyper-productivity.

I hope Engine Yard manages without them, and I still wish for Rubinius to
become THE Ruby interpreter. They did so much to actually standardize Ruby.

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samratjp
This is indeed big news! I really hope this means SproutCore will finally be a
mature framework. The biggest thing that I've found annoying with it was the
UI builder's not so stellar performance, other than that, they got a lot of
things right.

~~~
etgryphon
The UI builder isn't finished and is free so we have to steal time to make it.
Should see more commits to it soon.

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nitrogen
The post no longer mentions SproutCore, instead referring to "a new startup in
the mobile applications space." A comment mentioning SproutCore remains,
however.

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grandalf
This is great news. I can't wait to give SproutCore another look.

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michaelhalligan
Is anybody left at EngineYard?

~~~
justinchen
Dr. Nic just joined as VP of Technology

[http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/the-boys-and-girl-of-
sum...](http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/the-boys-and-girl-of-summer/)

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aneth
Yehuda really did an amazing job with Rails 3.0, both in improving the
architecture and explaining the decision made.

I don't know much about SproutCore yet, but I'm definitely going to take a
closer look now. I also don't know much about node.js yet, but it seems that
might be a good companion for SproutCore, so I wonder if Yehuda will go that
route as well.

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jshen
I'm on an iPad now and the demos on the sprout core site look like shit.

I really want a good ui framework for the web, but none are currently ready.

