This was a huge release, we'll be around to help anyone who wants to get started with the new version or Cappuccino in general. Find us on Freenode at #cappuccino or the mailing list, http://groups.google.com/group/objectivej.
Thanks to everyone that helped make this release happen!
Is anyone else astounded that none of the team members seem to be from the original set of developers? Are they entirely gone or just not in the driver's seat any more?
We're definitely still here, but the newer guys have really stepped up for this release so they deserve to be highlighted. I think that's a great sign for the long term viability of the project. If 280 North were hit by a bus Cappuccino would no longer die, which it probably would have 2 years ago.
I will tell you, as someone who drafted the blog post, we chose to highlight the newest members of our team rather than putting the original founders name on everything we publish. The community is growing very quickly.
Also, Ross's name is in the blog post. If you take a look at the Github repo you can see that both Francisco and Tom have recently put a lot of work into this release as well.
Well, GWT still deals heavily with HTML, CSS, and the DOM. It does offer certain abstractions that many frameworks do not. Both projects are certainly targeting a similar (but not completely identical) market.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "the real contender" though.
Sorry, English is not my native language. I was referring to the stackoverflow answer where it said gwt is a toolkit, cappucino is a framework. Sproutcore is a framework, so it seems someone would choose between cappucino or sproutcore if what they were looking for is a framework.
Each of the above has their strengths and weaknesses, and there are many more frameworks than I can list at the moment, but even with the select list above we can see there are many more contenders in this space than just Cappuccino, Sproutcore, and GWT.
Cappuccino and Objective-J will certainly be extremely comfortable for those coming from a Cocoa or GNUStep background. But even for traditional web developers, Objective-J allows you to do some extremely powerful things that just wouldn't be possible otherwise. That said, it is still a strict superset of Javascript, so any valid Javascript is still valid Objective-J, and vice versa.
While I don't think that making Mac developers feel comfortable was the Cappuccino team's primary motivation, the knowledge reuse that this enables is one tremendous advantage.
Developers well versed in Mac development have years of accreted knowlege of design patterns, common mistakes, and best practices, a great swath of which apply also to Cappuccino development.
I'm not talking about trivial things like how buttons clicks trigger functionality, or how to show a dialog; those can be learned in a short time in just about any language/framework.
I mean things such as: how to do robust undo/redo involving complex object graphs, how to build performant UIs that manipulate tens or hundreds of thousands of data records, or how to design complex interfaces with dozens of windows and model-view-conroller sets that avoid tight coupling and remain reasonable to refactor and maintain over time.
Building up this type of knowledge really does tend to take months, if not years, in just about any development environment you care to name. So the fact that Cappuccino leverages the experience that you or your team already has--in addition to doing the work of providing a framework and toolkit for UI and app logic, and abstracting away the DOM--is a tremendous advantage.
This is true only for some people, obviously; it's not a benefit if you don't already have that kind of experience (although IMO cap should still be on your short list of things to evaluate for new web apps). But if you do have significant Mac development experience, and especially if you're working on a short 8 or 12 month development cycle (say some company's internal HR admin app, or something like that), it can be the difference between hitting your deadline or being months late because of an accumulation of unforeseen issues and learning experiences along the way.
So I, for one, am heartily thankful to the Cappuccino team.
As was previously mentioned, Objective-J is a strict superset of JavaScript, which means it only adds things. Basically, we took features that are repeatedly added by other JS libraries (and that we believe are really better served as language features) and made them language features. A good example of this is classical inheritance. Just about every JS framework or library implements classical inheritance in one way or another using functions. We believe its much more intuitive to just have a keyword. For a really in depth explanation of our thinking, check out this blog post:
Cappuccino Team, I have always been amazed by your courage of entering the web tool world and your perseverance in doing what you do. Can you please share you progress so far, who uses your tool and what public application were build using your framework. Please don't take this the wrong way. Thx
Cappuccino is used on a variety of projects, some are internal and some are not. I've listed several applications being powered by Cappuccino, but certainly there are many more if anyone wants to list them.
Perhaps this has been answered elsewhere and I'm being lazy, but... What's the licensing for Cappuccino and Objective-J? Are people who build on these tools beholden to Motorola?
Edit: I Googled "Objective-J license" to answer my own question -- the answer was LGPL. Awesome!
Thanks to everyone that helped make this release happen!