Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche leave Engine Yard to work on SproutCore

The good: 1) SproutCore's MVC controller support is very nice, and a joy to use. You can wire up a view to an underlying data model, and you get bidirectional data propagation. 2) The SproutCore list view feels like a native widget, with excellent keyboard and mouse integration. 3) SproutCore gets a lot of fundamental architectural decisions correct. It's highly declarative, and you get an enormous amount of functionality for a tiny amount of code.

The bad: 1) SproutCore scrolling is choppy, and two-finger scrolling on the Mac is a mess. This is easy to fix—just use native scrolling—but the core team hasn't gotten around to fixing it. 2) As of this spring, SproutCore had no internal error-checking, which meant that I would spend literally 90% of my programming time in debugging hell. Once I finally figured things out, the answer was always 5 lines of beautiful, undocumented code. 4) The SproutCore testing situation was really shoddy—no Steak/Cucumber-style integration framework, and a dodgy unit test runner.

I _really_ want SproutCore to work. It's a gorgeous framework in so many ways, and as far beyond jQuery as Rails is beyond PHP. But as of early this summer, SproutCore wasn't ready for prime time. Fortunately, there's nothing wrong with SproutCore that a year of Yehuda Katz's time couldn't fix. So I'm really excited about this announcement, and seriously considering returning to SproutCore.

A lot of the pros and cons are similar for any thick framework: if you buy into it, you get a lot of power and functionality for free, but you need to fully buy into it and play the game the framework is playing. When your mandate is to build a web app with the size and feel of a native app, SproutCore is a good choice.

SproutCore is in a class with GWT and Cappuccino in that it's a thick-client framework. It is quite a bit of code that enables you to build powerful applications, but only makes sense if you're building a complex application. It contrasts with a small library like JQuery that is very flexible but only provides the minimum required for bootstrapping an app. Both in principle and in design it's similar to building an app using Cocoa instead of just in C.

I'll echo others' statements about the code and documentation. The docs left something to be desired when I was working with SproutCore, but by reading the code, I became a better JavaScript developer.

pros: friendly and helpful community, a number of things that 'just work' and a vocally espoused observers paradigm for wiring up your app that, when it works, is very nice and tidy. Very readable and well documented code base (I've read well over 50% of the codebase now, keep it open in a window all day). Can look very impressive in demos. Deals pretty well with most browsers and platforms (particularly iOS friendly).

cons: Compared to Rails, jQuery, etc... a relatively small community and not a lot of examples to learn from. The wiki is really hit-or-miss and the codebase is pretty much the only reliable source of documentation. Some of the features feel half-baked and like 'some person's pet project'. Some things don't 'just work' and can require a lot of hacking (not in the good way). The build tools are a little slow, which adds 15 seconds or so to every reload (which I do many many times every day, it adds up). Refactoring is a real pain (especially compared to our backend, written in java using eclipse), there just aren't that many tools. That's true of most javascript, but the sproutcore build tools add some 'macros' to javascript (like sc_require();) that really confuse the javascript refactoring tools that do exist.

Instead I finalized on qooxdoo - http://qooxdoo.org/ and was impressed with it and the mailing list was and is responsive and the developers from 1&1 quick to fix any bugs I found :)

And I finally had the table widget I always wanted with keyboard shortcuts for all the things I wanted.

Of course, it could be me not knowing enough to make sproutcore's table widget work like I wanted, since I was only a beginner in JS back then.

Edit: The demo at http://demo.sproutcore.com/table_view/ for the table still doesn't work with page up or page down. Maybe the feature is there, but not enabled for this demo.

I intend to revisit it once the Quilmes release (v1.5) is out the door.

I stalked Ezra at everything he wrote about deployment back in the day, and I really dug Yehuda for his awesome skill and hyper-productivity.

I hope Engine Yard manages without them, and I still wish for Rubinius to become THE Ruby interpreter. They did so much to actually standardize Ruby.

http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2010/the-boys-and-girl-of-sum...