Cappuccinno
I’ve been working on familiarizing myself with various JavaScript frameworks and methodologies over the past few weeks at work. I recently came across the Cappuccino framework. While I had seen this in the past, I never really tried it out. Well, last week I actually started poking around with it. 
The basic idea of the framework is to provide a platform for building web-based applications. That means it’s a library nothing like jQuery where you pick and choose what elements of jQuery you want, Cappuccinno is an all-or-nothing solution.
The thing I found most interesting was that the JavaScript you write is actually written in a language they call Objective-J. At its heart, it is Objective-C for JavaScript. This is pretty compelling as in theory you could more easily port an exisiting Cocoa application for the web. In practice, this is a long ways out as there is a lot of the underlying framework missing.
I did find writing the Objective-J code very familiar as I’ve used Objective-C in the past. Is this the new way to write web apps? I don’t know… definitely needs some work to before it truly becomes a v1 product, but it has potential.
Some might cringe that it abstracts the “HTML-ness” away from the web, but I don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing.
The most interesting thing about Cappuccinno, to me at least, is there Atlas project. It’s basically Interface Builder for JavaScript, which I find very interesting. They also have tools to convert your Nib files to Cib (basically a Cappuccino Nib file) files which allow you to load up UI that way.
It’s definitely a framework you should look into if you are developing a new web-app from scratch. It obviously doesn’t have the widespread use like jQuery does, but that’s not always a bad thing.
