SproutCore is a chainsaw and YUI is a paring knife
I have been playing with SproutCore a bit lately. So many great features and so very very simple. At first, I was expecting to either dismiss it as another library or love it so much that I replace my current favorite. Neither turned out to be the case, I love when a new solution can come along to solve a problem that I had already accepted would never be solved. In fact, SproutCore solves the same need for web client interfaces that Ruby on Rails solves for server web applications.
The JavaScript fat client is here to stay.
The entire “Web 2.0″ movement has proven that users love a solid fat client. I use gMail and Flickr every day as do hundreds of others and I know none of us miss waiting for a page load every time we click on a message or save a caption. Building these fat clients can be tedious with all of the state changes that need to be carefully choreographed. As an example, when you delete an email message, you might want to update a total message count. Was that the last unread message? well then you will also have to change the unread count to zero and change the folder style from bold to normal weight. Luckily, these are all pretty common needs and the SproutCore framework exists to provide this functionality to us allowing us to focus on other things.
This does not replace the need for traditional libraries.
Indeed we are becoming more and more aware that there are two different categories of web project, Web Apps and Web Sites. Web Apps are a lot like a desktop client. Users expect to have a single interface and be able to get to everything they need in few clicks. Web Sites, on the other hand are more like a news paper and people expect to enter through a front page of some kind and explore in to get more detailed information on a subject. For me, I have settled on creating one Web App project with a Ruby on Rails back-end mixed with a client written in SproutCore. Another project however, is a simple information site which will use PHP, along with a little interface help from YUI. I think it this is an important distinction to make as I can see these two areas branching off more and more as time goes on.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:32 am
[...] with speed to develop. That is until just before I started to get inspired to write my post “SproutCore is a chainsaw and YUI is a paring knife“. That is when I realized that a Web App is quite different from a web site and really should [...]
August 16th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!