Cappuccino arrives | Web Directions

I’m more of a latté kind of guy (well, not really), but today sees the arrival of the long anticipated Cappucino framework, from 280 North, makers of the beautiful web based presentation application (think Keynote for the Web) 280 Slides.

280 Slides particularly excited me as a web app, as it combines a lot of the slickness we expect from our desktop apps with the interconnectedness of the web. I honestly see a day not too far off, where I develop all my presentations using 280 Slides, and then can integrate them simply with SlideShare, which allows embedding of those presentations in web pages, just like we do here with past conference presentations.

I can also imagine a time in the not too distant future where we simply ask presenters to upload their presentations into 280 Slides - that way centralizing the management of the 30 or so presentations we get for conferences like Web Directions South.

But this is about Capuccino - so what exactly is it?

Well, at first glance, you might think it is just another Javascript Library - like JQuery, Dojo, Prototype, SproutCore and so on (many of which we’ll be covering in our JavaScript Libraries super session at the conference). But it aims to be a lot more than that. It’s in fact an open source, self contained framework, which coupled with a superset of Javascript (Objective-J) is designed expressly for building desktop-like applications for the web. Clearly, together Cappuccino and Objective-J are closely modelled on Apple’s Cocoa framework and Objective-C language.

The Capuccino folks tell us

Instead of worrying about how to implement drag and drop, copy and paste (of text and objects), undo and redo, document saving, rich cross-browser drawing and graphics, and a slew of other features, developers are free to focus on specific problems like PowerPoint support, or Twitter integration, or whatever else makes their application unique and compelling.

If you are a Cocoa/Obj-C developers, I suspect you’ll be up and running in little time with Cappuccino. As Objective-J is essentially JavaScript, anyone with decent JavaScript knowledge, and a fair grasp of object oriented programming will doubtless also be able to get across the technology quite quickly. And if you’d like to update your JavaScript skills, it’s hard to imagine a better way than with Douglas Crockford at Web Directions.

I also wonder how long before we see a GWT-like tool, that “compiles” Cocoa/Objective-C applications to Objective-J (clearly it would have to be a subset of the Cocoa framework)? At that point people could be writing their web applications using Apple’s XCode, and targetting the web, in addition to the iPhone, and the Mac OS X.

This is definitely something worth keeping an eye on.

Images:

The images are downsized due to limited space here. The original dimensions may differ.
Click on the image to open it on a new tab.