On: Objective-Smalltalk: now serving its own web site

[mpweiher]

Cappuccino, Cocoa in the browser with a Keynote clone written in it.

Way ahead of its time when the idea of writing full-fledged desktop apps in the browser still seemed ludicrous.

In a complete shock to me, the project is active and recently hit 1.0!

http://www.cappuccino-project.org/blog/2018/04/cappuccino-1-...

So that's also one of the directions for Objective-Smalltalk: use Cappuccino on the web.

[mhd → mpweiher]

There were some attempts at that kind of development experience, most famously ExtJS. So you could just use JavaScript once the authors took care of the HTML/CSS in their component library. And one step farther some attempts at using another language to generate that JavaScript, eg Vaadin or Google Web Toolkit.

Right now we're seeming to approach that again, only not exactly in a better way (you don't have to type HTML/CSS, but still know it all!).

[danpalmer → mpweiher]

> In a complete shock to me, the project is active and recently hit 1.0!

I'm quite surprised too. My guess is that a large company, most likely Apple, have a bunch of internal applications built on it so keep the project active enough with contributions or donations.

[chenglou → danpalmer]

Apple uses and maintains https://sproutcore.com, not Cappuccino. The latter was made by ex-applers a long time ago. Though Apple also isn't monolithic and has many teams independently evaluating Angular, React and others.

Not too coincidentally, the author of Objective-Smalltalk, who said above that he wants to leverage Cappuccino, has also written up his criticism of React here: https://blog.metaobject.com/2018/12/uis-are-not-pure-functio...

Related: I've talked to a Cappuccino founder recently too, and my casual observation (which he agreed with) was that had they done Cappuccino all over again, they should have probably dropped Objective-J. Imo it's just a bit too much of a language bikeshedding and I don't think it would have changed framework _that_ much (proof: Swift works well with UIKit and AppKit). Though my opinion was just based on practicality of adoption; if Objective-smalltalk wants to take its time exploring around more than anything else, then I'd say it + cappuccino seems like a nice fit.

I'm really looking forward to Cappuccino staying alive for another ten years (and I wish all the luck to Objective-smalltalk's author) =). Though the recent Cappuccino conf doesn't feature many younger programmers.