Atlas: a visual IDE for desktop-like web apps | Hacker News Reader

Atlas: a visual IDE for desktop-like web apps

arstechnica.com

38 pointsarockwell34 comments

This could be a killer app for business applications.

Having the development environment hooked up to the visual mockup designer is a key element for quickly bringing apps that the business likes and IT approves of.

If they can get this right, there is a lot of money here. Especially considering the amount of lazy IT shops out there.

That's the problem with desktop-like UI, it's created by lazy developers. They used and learnt RAD ten years ago and they don't want to bother to learn HTML and how the web works.

Lazy developers are something corporations and IT departments have to live with. The good ones leave and end up working for startups or go independent.

The great thing about an IDE like this is that it can be a foundation for RAD projects - it could let IT departments finally move those aging VB6 / Access applications to the web.

HTML and "the web" were designed as a simple information-sharing platform based on hyperlinked static text documents.

Building actual business applications on top of this, even if you know how the web works, has always been pretty much a kludge.

Or any kind of application thanks to the mess of standards that web developers have had to deal with. Atlas and Flex are an imperfect workaround for that problem.

Atlas must appear pretty killer to people who haven't seen Flex Builder.

Flex is very nice, but Flex uses a flash plugin as it's runtime. A flex application is compiled binary sent to the browser - doesn't sound very dynamic or open web to me.

Cappucino uses good old XHTML and javascript. If you look at browser advancements in Javascript just in the past few months alone, 2 years from now technologies like flash may only be useful for very niche circumstances.

Cappucino uses good old XHTML and javascript.

Does it really? When I view source on http://280slides.com/Editor/ I don't see much HTML. Does Atlas generate HTML or something else? In what ways does Cappucino participate in the open Web?

View source will only show the state of the HTML before Javascript renders the rest of the HTML. Check out the application using firebug (firefox plugin) and look at the HTML that is actually being rendered. Lots of div's for the layout of course and a few canvas elements (i think those are for the slide rendering).

While it may not be the most readable XHTML in the world - at least it doesn't use a plugin to do that work.

I don't see any HTML and precious little "open web" in Flash, Mr hey-hooray-for-Flex-Builder.

Yeah, that's my point; they look pretty equal to me.

Yes, it does really use HTML and JavaScript. Cappuccino "participates" in the open web as much as any other application written on top of open web technologies.

Isn't objective-J translated to javascript by a sort of compiler? in that case you can't easily re-use pieces of code and use them in your javascript application.

Obj-J is run by, yes, a JavaScript file! It can be reused anywhere that ObjectiveJ.js will run.

The power of Flex is in MXML + Actionscript, not in the sad excuse for an editor that is Flex Builder.

It's Eclipse.

Exactly.

Every web app that I've ever created in my five years as a web developer has been ugly as hell, because neither I nor my employers could or would ever pay a good designer to make it pretty. I've spent literally years creating ugly things.

This could change that. I likey. I likey a lot.

Why does so many people want to create desktop-like web apps? It's not a desktop, it's the web. It never worked and it always looked bad and unusable.

Gmail? Google Docs? They work, look fine, and lots of people use them all day long.

Neither of those are at all desktop-like. Google was arguably the first NON-desktop-like email emulator, because it didn't include things like drag-and-drop, focusing instead on what it could do well that a desktop app couldn't.

I think your last sentence answers your question.

Laziness. We know what desktop apps are supposed to look like, but designing good Web apps is still more of an art.

reusing learned behavior is good for usability.

As the world shifts from desktop software to web-based software, tools like this are going to be huge.

Atlas is going to enable nearly every single cocoa developer to start making webapps instantly. No learning Rails or self-teaching JavaScript.

Apple should have done this already. 280north has a huge headstart.

Apple used this to build its mobileme webapps.

Is this true?

No, it isn't.

Sorry, messed up, confused it with SproutCore.

What does Apple have to gain in having Cocoa developers developing web-apps instead of desktop apps? (serious question)

If anything, I feel like it would actually be a bad thing: a web-app that looks like a (Mac) desktop app doesn't sell more Macs since it would run the same on any OS.

Why do they make iTunes for Windows?

For iTunes, they do it because it makes them money by selling iPods and music. A better question to me would be "Why do they make Safari for Windows?". I'm not sure... is it to show different Apple software to Windows users and lure them into buying Macs? That sounds doubtful to me but I might be wrong.

But my question was a serious question: what do you think Apple has to gain from getting the Cocoa/Obj-C developers to write web-apps in Obj-J?

I'm not impressed. Building RSS reader without writing a single line of code? This is not important at all. We all know anything else will take lots and lots of code to write.

Also what's up with emulating desktop GUI on web? That's just dumb. When users see desktop GUI, they expect it to behave like desktop GUI as well. If their drag-and-drop and context menus fail, they think application is broken. Why would any sane developer want to confuse its users like this.

No matter how good this IDE is... it's still for desktop-like web apps, failed branch of web-development, so it's already FAIL and waste of time of these talented programmers.

Who says that drag and drop, or context menus, need to fail? And why would any sane user, who's spent the last 15 years getting used to the way desktop software works, want to switch to a completely different, entirely text based user interface?

Any existing user of Office will feel far more comfortable in 280 Slides than in Google's presentation app. Desktop-class applications are not always the right answer, but to say they are never the right answer seems pretty silly.

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