First Sip Of Cappuccino

"With Cappuccino, you don't need to know HTML. You'll never write a line of CSS. You don't ever have to interact with DOM. We only ask developers to learn one technology."

A lot of progress has been made in bridging the gap of dynamism and interactivity between desktop and web applications. If Ajax was the harbinger of RIA; Prototype and JQuery actuated a whole new set of applications which today constitutes so called web 2.0.

But as opposed to "desktop development" support in terms of tools and documentation had always been scarce for web applications. Which apart from making web application development difficult; increases the learning curve for a developer who had been developing desktop applications previously. Primary technologies which are essence of web i.e. HTML, Javascript and CSS are entirely different from ones which are used in desktop development.

Cappuccino is new kid on the block for web frameworks which totally alleviates a developer from learning most of the above mentioned technologies. 280slides is the first full fledged application developed using Cappuccino. It is pretty impressive what all can be done in fledgling state of this framework. Some noteworthy points:

• No compilation required (big plus)
• Have a language Objective-J based on Objective-C written on top of Javascript
  
• Comprehensive API

Keeping the power of framework aside. I am not at all impressed with Objective-J's syntax. I found it bit cumbersome. May be it is like this because of its dependencies on Javascript? Some points:

• Requires + or - sign before every method (??)
  
• All method parameters has to be labeled which becomes part of the method name

See the following code


var myPerson = [[Person alloc] init];

What's happening here is that for getting a new instance of Person, I am first calling a built in method alloc and calling init (which is another built in method) on the instance returned by previous call. How can it not be eliminated?

Similarly, keyword self can be used to represent this or class itself depending upon the context. You kidding me?

• Cappuccino allows any Javascript object to act like Objective-J object at the same time. You can even use Javascript code inside the Objective-J code.

I quickly ran through Cappuccino's Starter Package. I am really impressed with the API and will certainly explore the framework further. But I am certain that it will take a while before anyone can get addicted.

Update: I thought my reservations with syntax may not be right in context of making Objective-J similar to Objective-C. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

Links:
http://cappuccino.org/learn/tutorials/objective-j-tutorial.php
http://cappuccino.org/learn/documentation/