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I used SproutCore heavily from February until the start of the summer, when we pivoted to focus on server-side features for a while. So my information is a bit out of date, and some of the problems described below may have been fixed.

The good: 1) SproutCore's MVC controller support is very nice, and a joy to use. You can wire up a view to an underlying data model, and you get bidirectional data propagation. 2) The SproutCore list view feels like a native widget, with excellent keyboard and mouse integration. 3) SproutCore gets a lot of fundamental architectural decisions correct. It's highly declarative, and you get an enormous amount of functionality for a tiny amount of code.

The bad: 1) SproutCore scrolling is choppy, and two-finger scrolling on the Mac is a mess. This is easy to fix—just use native scrolling—but the core team hasn't gotten around to fixing it. 2) As of this spring, SproutCore had no internal error-checking, which meant that I would spend literally 90% of my programming time in debugging hell. Once I finally figured things out, the answer was always 5 lines of beautiful, undocumented code. 4) The SproutCore testing situation was really shoddy—no Steak/Cucumber-style integration framework, and a dodgy unit test runner.

I _really_ want SproutCore to work. It's a gorgeous framework in so many ways, and as far beyond jQuery as Rails is beyond PHP. But as of early this summer, SproutCore wasn't ready for prime time. Fortunately, there's nothing wrong with SproutCore that a year of Yehuda Katz's time couldn't fix. So I'm really excited about this announcement, and seriously considering returning to SproutCore.




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