GWT, Cappuccino, Sproutcore: AJAX-Framework-Shootout
vierundsechzig.de
vierundsechzig.de
It is a fairly complex web application both in terms of UI and functionality, developed and maintained by essentially one guy, which IMHO speaks volumes about the power of GWT to produce and manage AJAX application code. All of the code base contains zero lines of Javascript - it is all regular Java classes.
It's like saying that rails doesn't look good. Taking cappaccinos style and porting it to gwt would only be a couple of days work, if that.
I think I might have to post a tutorial.
Of the two hours it took to create that, most was spent making a video, learning gwt 1.6 and downloading images from 280north (they make it hard).
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280slides has such a polished theme that I think it would take some significant time to duplicate. It's not one thing--it's every thing. You might be able to get something close quicker, but I suspect it would look like I-wish-I-was-280slides.
Still, from what I know of GWT (no direct experience) and cappuccino (tried it out, seemed to make lower-level DOM wrangling very hard, which was absolutely essential to the project), you're working at a higher level of UI abstraction than I yet have. With jQuery UI, I'd have to add tons of markup to my dialogs (e.g.) to implement the 280slides look, and there's no one place to do it.
So, post a link to your 280slides-like GWT app and/or write that tutorial, and I may well have to admit that you are faster than I and/or have more powerful tools (likely both).
And now I have to say:
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Well no kidding it doesn't take long to borrow someone's images and arrange a few in a way that more or less looks like the original. But (not to put too fine a point on it) your demo looks very, very rough, and 280slides looks like the best-looking app you've ever used. Your buttons aren't spaced right; they look wrong in hover state; they look wrong in active state. The dialog doesn't really look anything like a 280slides one apart from having a shadow (nor does it look very good on its own merits). And that's just what I can see in a tiny, compressed video of the little bit that you built.
You might still be faster than me and have better tools, but you didn't prove it here. OTOH, if you could produce something with the polish 280slides in two hours you'd be more than fast--you'd be able to rewrite the matrix from within.
Here is another version done with some different images I hacked up quickly: http://i43.tinypic.com/x5wjdt.jpg
Obviously I could spend another hour fixing pixels. But that wasn't the point. The point is that GWT can be styled just like every other browser application/website, and it's trivial to do, just like it is for any other framework.
If I can do this in a few hours everyone else can too.
"GWT is just html.Taking cappaccinos style and porting it to gwt would only be a couple of days work, if that."
I never claimed that their interaction was easy to clone.
1. I'm not sure what exactly is impressive about this demo, you have a couple buttons which pop up a window that has dummy content in it, and then expect people to think that it proves that making something that looks and behaves like 280 Slides is easy. For starters, this is the least impressive portion of 280 Slides. I don't for example see a slide navigator which shows a tiny version of the working area, and I also don't see a working area that has vector properties that works in all browsers. These are the components which would be hardest to build without Cappuccino in my opinion. I'm not sure even the toolbar works like the one in 280 Slides. For example, when you make the window too small does it auto place the items that aren't visible into a menu on the right based on their priority of importance? If your point was simply that you can make buttons with custom images in GWT, then I guess you've succeeded.
2. Beyond this, designing itself is also quite difficult, which I hope is not something we have to argue about, since to say otherwise would be to invalidate the designing profession as a whole. One thing we are trying to do with Cappuccino is provide a good set of base artwork and a HIG that will make this easier for people who can't afford a real designer. Large portions of this work will of course be usable outside of Cappuccino since we are making them open source, but others will be much easier as they will be built into Cappuccino.
The claim was that GWT is simple to style. Surely I proved that claim. It's HTML and graphics people!
I'm obviously missing something.
As anyone had success on customizing cappuccino's design in a small time frame? How does it compare to the other frameworks?
What in particular have you found hard?
Well I hear that people claim CSS + GWT can do most of what people want, but I never quite believe it, but glad you found it easy (even learning a little of GWT1.6).
Second, that's the most American-unfriendly name I've ever seen for a product. Sure, gianduia is the name of a chocolate with hazelnut paste, but I'd be interested to see what the public name of such a product would be.
Wolf Rentzsch tweeted about it after a demo, though: Blown away by gianduia. Cappuccino, SproutCore and JavascriptMVC have serious competition. Serious. http://twitter.com/rentzsch/status/2060613851
Gianduia essestially is browser-side Cocoa (including CoreData) + WebObjects, written in JavaScript by non-js-haters. Jaw dropped http://twitter.com/rentzsch/status/2060717454
As for the name: yeh, I wouldn't be surprised if that turned out to be a codename.