Hi, I'm in the planning stage of a web application and I'm trying to choose between GWT and Cappuccino. I have an idea of which one I think is better, but my partner is sold on the other choice. I was hoping to get some feedback on pros and cons for each from people who have used one or the other or both. Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.
+2
A:
I am much more experienced with Cappuccino than GWT, but from the looks of it GWT looks blazingly fast and fairly robust. It is after all backed by a fairly large player in the internet field. The demonstration at Google IO was impressive. Although this might change, GWT apps totally leave Cappuccino in the dust when it comes to load times and deployment size today.
That said, I went with Cappuccino for two reasons: first, while GWT is a classical 'good enough' engineering solution, Cappuccino is squarely targeted at 'only the best is good enough' crowd. I believe that with Cappuccino you can achieve a standard rarely seen on the web before. Not only in pretty pixels, but in raw functionality and power where everything just works at a 'desktop quality' level. Drag and drop, undo stack, fluid scrolling and resizing, split panes, and on and on. GWT is catching up, as seen in Google Wave, but it has a long way to go and Google has not traditionally cared much about polish. This is visible, for instance, in Gmail which is still not only drab looking but clunky in the user interaction after this many years.
The second reason I went with Cappuccino is that Java drives me insane with its inflexible, ridiculously verbose and unreadable style. But that might only be me.
Alexander Ljungberg
2010-05-29 02:47:38
you went with Objective-J because of Java's ridiculously verbose and unreadable style??
seanmonstar
2010-05-29 03:01:23
Objective-J is verbose in the sense that it has long method names, Java is verbose in the sense that you have to write more lines of code. To me that makes a big difference.
Alexander Ljungberg
2010-05-29 05:55:08
i notice more Objective-J's unreadable style. thats what matters most to me.
seanmonstar
2010-05-29 06:34:15
I'll agree with Java's inflexibility and verbosity, and I appreciate what Cappuccino is doing, but I think Objective-J is *far* more unreadable than Java... But that's my opinion.
musicfreak
2010-05-30 07:26:53
If you're experienced with Objective-C, you find find Objective-J unreadable at all. I find it perfectly readable but thats just me
Brock Woolf
2010-06-29 00:49:02
@Brock: I guess you mean "If you're experienced with Objective-C, you **don't** find Objective-J unreadable at all."
flight
2010-07-06 15:46:47
@flight yeah that's what I mean. Brain must have stopped working mid sentence
Brock Woolf
2010-07-09 15:41:38
Great summary. However, "Offline Compilation v/s Runtime Translation" is incorrect. Cappuccino provides an offline compiler. While developing your application you may choose to not use it to save yourself the compile step, and Cappuccino will then transparently compile your code in the runtime. Before deployment you would normally compile offline before minimizing and running optimizers such as the dead code removal tool 'flatten'.
Alexander Ljungberg
2010-05-31 16:20:35
There is an experimental type safety flag in Cappuccino although it's a runtime check rather than a compile time one. It's not very useful at this time.
Alexander Ljungberg
2010-05-31 16:23:02