ByTheProgrammer

FOWA : How to build advanced web apps with Cappuccino and Objective-J

Working at BTO as a web developper has great benefits, and one of them is that I’m actually in the beautiful city of Miami, attending the FOWA Future of Web Apps 2009 conference & workshops!

This morning, I had the chance to assist to Francisco Tolmasky’s (280 North) workshop called “How to build advanced web apps with Cappuccino and Objective-J”. It was an absolutely great demo and I’m actually very excited about using this framework for incoming projects at ByTheOwner. However, it was pretty technical, so I’ll have to play with the code and the demos in the following days to capture and be able to communicate what I’ve learned here. So, i’ll try to keep the blog updated with my upcoming experimentations.

« Cappuccino is an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser. »

This would be the “one sentence definition” for this framework according to the 280north website and I think it’s perfectly good. However, you need to understand what would be a “desktop-caliber application”. We’re talking about web apps like google maps, google docs, 280slides.com, etc… Web apps that you actually work and do something with. If you have a content oriented website (the Times for example) then Cappuccino isn’t a framework you should use to create your website, it’s simply not made/designed for that.

Here are finally a couple of highlights and notes about the framework I took during the workshop. I also include a video of a previous conference I found the 280north’s blog.

Very Quick Highlights about using Cappuccino and Objective-J

• You’ll never have to worry about layout cross-browser inconsistencies
• Built in support for the basic “OS” fonctions like undo, redo, save, open, new, autosave, etc… All things that people are not used to find in webapps nowadays and that makes it so much more usable and “wow-able”
• Uses a strict javascript superset that gives you compatibility with any regular javascript
• The visual controllers give you an incredible control over the way elements need to behave when the window is changing size
• A whole bunch of advanced form elements are available for you with almost no work at all (very cool color well for example…)
• The form elements can be skinned and will look very nice in all browser
• nib2cib provides an interface builder (wysiwyg style) application to help you design your cappuccino web app
• and many many many more…

Visit cappuccino.org for more information, demos and tutorials »

Time to get some sleep before FOWA’s day #2…

Frédérick Dubois
ByTheOwner.com / DuProprio.com