Cappuccino Training Course: iDeveloper TV | Hacker News Reader

Cappuccino Training Course: iDeveloper TV

cappuccino.org

41 pointsMe10009 comments

As a person who's used Cappuccino a bit, I'm really surprised that it hasn't gained more traction. The apps that you can create with it look stunning. It has a lot of functionality out of the box; it's really a cool framework.

I bought one to show my support for the community. Hopefully more people will get involved in Cappuccino development. Thanks for making this.

Many thanks for the kind words. We had a great time making the video, even though I had to personally suffer some great indignities during the filming:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bVWVlqXNC0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjbJqR8VGrU

It had a lot of momentum building, but then Motorola bought 280 North and killed off Atlas and it seemed to lose steam pretty fast. (I mean, not to say it's out for the count. Just that its growth has tapered off and other technologies have sort of taken its place in the zeitgeist.)

Could you include a teaser video?

Heyyyyyyy Mr. Tambourine Man: many people have asked for this. I'm pretty sure that an excerpt video is in the works.

It still surprises me that people love Objective-C so much that they wanted to create an ObjC-to-JavaScript compiler. Not the direction I would have taken though.

But its not an Obj-C to javascript compiler: its Objective-J, a entirely new language that is a strict superset of Javascript: pure Javascript is also valid Obj-J. You wouldnt call Objective-C an "Objective C to C compiler" since valid C is Objective-C.

Contrast this with GWT, which is a Java to Javascript compiler. Unless you wrap it in a native method, you dont write javascript with GWT: i.e. GWT is a Java-Javascript compiler, not a new language like Obj-J

It was actually that people love Cocoa so much that we wanted to built it on the web. As a result, Objective-J was born, since it makes a lot of sense in the context of Cocoa.

An Objective-C-like language wasn't the goal, but it happened to be a great fit for a couple reasons:

1. We wanted to add the same features to JavaScript that Objective-C added to C, namely classical inheritance, while remaining a strict superset of the language. The first language we prototyped actually looked more like Java.

2. Cappuccino's APIs are similar to Cocoa's, so it's a natural fit, rather than having to translate all the method names to JS identifiers (a la PyObjC or RubyCocoa)

That said, a lot of people share your opinion, so I'd like to provide pure JavaScript bindings to Cappuccino. IMHO it won't be as nice of an experience, but some people will be willing to make that tradeoff to avoid learning a new language.

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