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Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

Anyone using Cappucino in production? Looks pretty awesome, although a bit slow I found, but not really heard of too many people using it.

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Yes, we used it for http://www.akshell.com. Here's a blog post about the experience (in Russian but Google Translate should do a good job): http://habrahabr.ru/post/114749/.

I started translating it to English for http://dailyjs.com but never had the time to finish it. If this comment gets enough votes I'll do it ;)

We are using it for the web version of our Mac and iOS app (store-news-app.com). The web version can be found here:

http://store-news-app.com/web/

Edit: We made this nearly 2 years ago without updating it. It has some flaws now which should be fixed. :/

I'm on a fairly slow (but usually usable) connection, and your site never loaded for me. I waited for 2min and only saw a throbber. Not sure if this is a problem with Cappuccino or your site. (Chrome/OSX)

How slow is your connection?

Cappuccino is a rather big framework and it needs more time to load on the first run than a web app which is not using Cappuccino. But as I mentioned: I haven't touched this little app for years so there may be something wrong with it.

This is a good question. It seems like Cappucino is targeted squarely at Cocoa developers looking to do web development without retooling, just as GWT is targeted toward Java Swing developers looking to do the same thing. This can't be a large target audience. (And I imagine that the few hard-core users would probably be willing (and able) to pay something for it.)

(Haven't we all sort of agreed that the best way to do UI is largely declarative, and then we wire things together with a selector based library? Why go through the pain of having to write code just to describe static UI resources?)

This is exactly what you do in Interface Builder, although its visual.

Programming with GWT is nothing like swing. Nothing.

Oh really.

I've programmed both. Have you?

Let's see if you can tell which of these snippets is GWT and which is Swing (I've renamed JButton to Button to not make it trivially easy for you):

    Button b = new Button("Click me", new ClickHandler() {
      public void onClick(ClickEvent event) {
        //do something
      }
    });

    Button b = new Button("Click Me");
    b.addActionListener(new ActionListener(){
        void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e){
            //do something
        }
    });

The first is unidiomatic GWT, the latter is swing. I can count the times I've set up a button with a click handler without UIBinder on one hand. So I'll assume based on your post that you always instantiated buttons that way since you never learned how to use GWT beyond how to run the compiler.

Disclaimer: I'm involved with the Cappuccino project

It's more targeted at a specific niche, the far end of the static website -> web application spectrum. So it's not a large audience, but for its target audience it does it exceptionally well.

The same could probably be said about extjs, too, but you'd find lots of intranet apps written in it -- often replacing predecessors written with Swing or even Tcl/Tk. Another popular approach here seems to be GWT. None of this is exactly "sexy" and blog-worthy, but neither are the POS and CRM apps themselves...

And here I could see some inroads for Cappuccino, if it were targeted in that direction. Lots of companies are making their own business iOS applications, so having browser-based systems with a similar UX and API would be worth it. But to gain enterprise customers, you'd probably need more marketing in that direction and paid support.

We are. Our product is inventory management software for event rental companies. You can see video of the product in action at http://www.rwelephant.com/videos/

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