Since the release of the iPhone SDK earlier this year, developers have been confined by an NDA from discussing or decimating information relating to the SDK’s contents. This has effectively limited developers in their ability to discuss many techniques and capabilities of content development for the iPhone. With the pass of WWDC and no reported mention of a lift of the NDA, iPhone developers worldwide appear to be in a state of limbo.

While it is presumed the NDA will be lifted with the debut of the app store and the 3G iPhone on July 11th, details have begun to emerge on some of the new capabilities for content delivered through MobileSafari. One that you may be hearing a lot about in the near future is SproutCore.

A Glimpse of The Future
As Apple’s public schedule for WWDC explained, “SproutCore is an open source, platform-independent, Cocoa-inspired JavaScript framework for creating web applications that look and feel like Desktop applications. Learn how to combine SproutCore with HTML5’s standard offline data storage technologies to deliver a first-class user experience and exceptional performance in your web application.

The developers website described SproutCore as “A framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code. It can help you build full ‘thick’ client applications in the web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data. JavaScript applications are faster, easier to use, and a lot easier to write than complicated Ajax-driven applications. When you use a framework like SproutCore to help you, they can also be a lot of fun to write.”

Tom Krazit writes: “Web applications are big these days, and developers are continuously looking for ways to improve the performance and sex appeal of their applications. To that end, they often find themselves using frameworks like Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight technology to save time and take advantage of flashier graphics. But once you choose to develop a Web application for one of those standards, you’re essentially locked into the browser plug-ins for that one particular standard.

SproutCore gets around that lock-in by letting more of the Web application run inside the browser, rather than in the plug-in. Apple apparently used SproutCore to build the Web applications unveiled last week as part of the new MobileMe service, which replaces the aging .Mac service.”

Also worth mentioning is a recent article “Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore” by Daniel Eran Dilger which has some interesting points on the future of open web and SproutCore.

With a sold out WWDC behind us, the release of firmware 2.0 in July and iPhone Dev Camp coming up in August, it is shaping up to be a great summer for iPhone web app developers - stay tuned to our website for the latest news and information.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...