What is SproutCore and why should I care? [closed]

Question

I have just seen the news that a person has left Apple to develop SproutCore. It seems to yet another collection of jscript code.

So what is the big deal and way are a lot of people making song and dance about it?

What does it provide that jquery / extJs / etc does not provide?

How does anyone decide if it is worth investing the time to find out if it is useful to them?

There must be something different about it that is getting people excited, however I can see what from its website, so what am I missing?

(Or it that I can’t understand its web site because I am not a ruby programmer?)

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I just found http://wiki.sproutcore.com/About-SproutCore-Project that gives a better write up, it seems that SproutCore does not work with IE6 that somewhat limits it to websites for home users and small companies. One day large corporations and government will move away from IE6, but I still see IE6 support on the spec for way too many tenders.

Maseru

Answer 1

The deal with SC is that it is a fully featured MVC framework for writing RIAs. ExtJS is a collection of integrated components. MVC means that you have distinct Model, View, Controller layers.

I worked with SC for 6 months and was amazed with the effectiveness of it. In SC, when you load some model objects, the views bound those objects via controllers automatically update. You don't write any code, like you would in extjs, whereby a user does something and there is an event handler that tells all the views to update. (Or at least you write a lot less of that type of stuff).

The SC widget set is not nearly as robust as EXTs, but you can write your own views for just about anything. The other thing is that SC comes with a unit testing framework integrated. That is awesome. You can test your model code, your controller code, and view code in isolation.

EDIT -- ExtJS/Sencha has become more MVC oriented in their latest release, so the statement that ext is a 'framework of components' no longer applies.

I still think SC is a great framework that will give anyone interested a lot of mileage.

Mythologize

Some of these statements may no longer be true about ExtJS 4 – Sphalerite

@sym3tri, true, but they are definitely accurate at the time written. – Mythologize

Yes, no arguments there. Just making sure anyone who comes across this now is aware. – Sphalerite

Answer 2

It seems like you are tired of new stuff :)

But it's a quite powerful framework which tries to go beyond DOM limitations on a web application, sproutcore has a different scope than jQuery/extJs etc., you can compare it to for example cappuccino framework but not to most known js libraries. Both have their own controls, web elements etc to create more desktop like applications on web browsers.

You can check Mozilla's Bespin project to see what can be achieved with SproutCore. And also take a look at what they have done with Cappuccino to understand why they left their jobs at Apple.

Hanni

I am tired of a 101 half baked solutions for creating web apps and the fact that no two developers write web code that each other are happy to work on! – Maseru

@Ian Ringrose How many developers do you know that are happy to work on someone else's code? It's the nature of the beast. We like to create. It's just like artists being critical of each other. That's just the way it is. – Nielson

@George, yes but is seems to be a lot bigger problem with the web as no two large web applications seem to be like each other. (Winforms applications seem to be a lot more like each other) – Maseru

@Ian Ringrose That's expected, as there are many technologies available for web applications and many of them are rather loose, allowing for more ways to do the same thing. While many Winforms apps are similar, that doesn't necessarily extend to all applications. Better yet, Winforms aren't the only way to create applications. You're basically comparing a subset of application programming technologies to the whole universe of web application programming. – Nielson

@George, Think aobut two jobs specs, one that says WinForms and the other that says Asp.net and how hard it is for someone that has work in a past job with the same job spec to learn the new job. – Maseru

@Ian Ringrose What about comparing .NET GUI programming to ASP.net, instead? IMO ASP.net is much broader than WinForms. Personally, I'm tired of all the different GUI development models that Microsoft has managed to churn out. That said, WPF seems promising. At any rate, even if we're comparing .NET GUI programming to creating web applications with ASP.net, I'd expect ASP.net to have more variability. If you think this is bad, perl is well known for having a zillion different ways to do the same thing. – Nielson

There is nothing fundamentally amazing or new about SC. I don't see why writing an application to run inside a browser is so amazing. Well, perhaps for the web2.0 eyecandy goons. Oh, Hello World! There you are! HHOS... – Ailyn