

Announcing SproutCore 2.0 Developer Preview - jtaby
http://blog.sproutcore.com/announcing-sproutcore-2-0/

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jashkenas
Many congrats on the preview release.

In my opinion, this is a brave move from the team -- acknowledging that the
SproutCore approach from the past four years needs to be ditched in favor of a
brand-new codebase, and one that's a small fraction of the size (both code and
API-wise) of the previous SproutCore.

Even though it's not recommended right now, I imagine that in due time SC 2.0
will also be recommended for "desktop-style" web applications, and when that
happens, it'll be a force to be reckoned with.

~~~
boucher
It strikes me as less than brave, especially when you consider that 1.0 and
1.5 were also essentially backwards incompatible rewrites.

This update seems to move SproutCore away from what made it unique and towards
something that mostly resembles what everyone else writing web frameworks is
doing.

~~~
jashkenas
Totally -- but it takes balls to acknowledge that. I'd certainly feel betrayed
if I had been a loyal SproutCore user: templates for the user interface is
almost a complete 180° from the prior gospel.

But from an outside perspective, I think this could make SC truly competitive,
and that's going to be a good thing for JavaScript-heavy web apps in general.

~~~
boucher
I'm not actually sure if the idea of templates alone is that much of a
departure, I could see something template like working in Cappuccino (a more
human readable version of a XIB perhaps), but relying on HTML and CSS is
something I'm obviously not crazy about.

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cageface
Interesting that they're reducing the emphasis on native look and feel. The
thing that's put me off all the native-mimicking JS libs like EXT and
Sproutcore is that making web apps imitate native desktop apps seems like the
wrong move in many cases. The web gives us a chance to rethink a lot of those
old assumptions and newer, cleaner interfaces like Github etc. suggest that
some of those old assumptions can be abandoned.

~~~
ojosilva
I agree that html freedom has done a lot to user interfaces and ux. But that
works best in a web setting.

In an intranet setting (the kinda place where IE6 may still linger for 2-3
years) using standardized RIA frameworks like ExtJS help speedup the
development cycle by offloading 80% of the design work from the 1000+
developers, which probably already have a handful trying to figure out in
which order a certain financial transaction needs to be called on the
Mainframe CICS-DB2.

~~~
cageface
I spent the last ten years writing intranet apps and evaluated and rejected
EXT and similar frameworks several times because it just didn't meet our
internal users' needs. They preferred our lightweight interfaces that rendered
quickly and well on all kinds of different devices.

However, our environment was a little unusual in that we were able to mandate
reasonably modern browsers (FF 3+, Webkit).

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hallman76
Note: they're _announcing_ 2.0, not releasing anything ready for prime time.

The announcement indicates that they're releasing SproutCore 2.0 _Developer
Preview_ with the caveat: "SproutCore 2.0 is still under heavy development and
APIs are likely to change."

~~~
jtaby
I updated the title of the post to more accurately reflect that this is a
Developer Preview release. Apologies for any confusion on our part.

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lapusta
Looks more lightweight now, but still it's 12k LOC vs 1k LOC in Backbone. Need
to look through, what do those 11k offer :)

Pure JS and drop-in integration is good too, we are a Java shop and lots of
developers working on Windows, so introducing a Ruby-dependent JS framework
would be hard in my case.

Previously we also considered SC as a 'heavy' JS solution - like Cappuccino,
ExtJS or GWT(we used GWT for complex backends - it allowed us to share
UI&server code), but now we'll have another look at it as an alternative to
Backbone for frontends/mobile.

~~~
mbesto
I'm helping a colleague of mine get into a RIA start-up and the original
development he used ASP MVC on Windows. Do you know if any of the RIA JS
frameworks play nicely with ASP MVC?

~~~
dogonwheels
How about Knockout? So it's not a 'full' RIA JS framework, but in my mind,
that's no bad thing: <http://knockoutjs.com/>

It feels like a nice fit to MVC/MS stuff (there's certainly plenty of examples
of this, and Steve Sanderson now works for MS). And it's easy to bind whatever
UI you want to your view models.

Personally I now use KO for even the smallest of JS/HTML 'apps'. It's lovely
:)

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grandalf
There's an annotated Todo app source code just like Backbone.js (awesome!) ...
however no link to the actual app hosted somewhere so I can play with it and
experience the interaction.

~~~
wycats
Check it out at <http://todos20.strobeapp.com/>

~~~
grandalf
thanks!! Anyone else have any useful links? I am looking forward to doing my
first hello Sproutcore app and would love to know about the best blog posts,
etc.

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arturadib
To me one of the more compelling things about Sproutcore in comparison to
other Javascript MVC/binding frameworks (Backbone.js, Knockout, Angular.js,
JavascriptMVC, etc) was that it seemed to offer a beautiful UI toolkit that
was modern-looking and tailored to web apps.

Is part of the plan to shift focus away from that UI aspect?

If not, is there a tutorial on how to put together a simple app that uses some
of the available UI components?

Thanks guys, keep up the great work.

~~~
rbranson
I think that was exactly the problem with SproutCore -- it was essentially
inseparable from it's UI toolkit.

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minhajuddin
From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference between SC 2
and Backbone.js. Can anyone point out when someone would go for SC 2 instead
of Backone.js.

~~~
shanewholloway
I've been evaluating Backbone, Spine, JavascriptMVC, Knockout.js, and
Sproutcore 2. What I like most about SC2 is the direct support for key-value
coding, including bindings and reusable well-defined controllers.

I also find the 5-layer [Model, Model-Controller, Controller, View-Controller,
View] better for my OO coding style and isolation of dependencies — but that's
probably more of a personal quirk.

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dmix
Would this be suitable for a mobile app? The existing view builder in
sproutcore made that a no-go. But with HTML views it might have potential.

~~~
tomdale
If you look at most mobile-optimized web applications today, they tend to be
very "web-style," which SproutCore 2.0 is great for.

In the next few months, we will be working on a mobile control set that allows
you to create more "native-style" interactions. I think both have their place
and can deliver awesome experiences to users.

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ynniv
Great move guys! I've been working with SproutCore for a couple of years now,
and reducing the framework overhead and ditching the ruby tool chain is a
great step in the right direction. sproutcore.com is looking shinier than
ever, and the NPR web app is awesome. I'm not even sure how you got streaming
audio in a web page on the iPad.

