What is SproutCore and why should I care?

Question

I have just seen the news that a person has left Apple to develop SproutCore. It seems to yet another collection of jscript code.

So what is the big deal and way are a lot of people making song and dance about it?

What does it provide that jquery / extJs / etc does not provide?

How does anyone decide if it is worth investing the time to find out if it is useful to them?

There must be something different about it that is getting people excited, however I can see what from its website, so what am I missing?

(Or it that I can’t understand its web site because I am not a ruby programmer?)

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I just found http://wiki.sproutcore.com/About-SproutCore-Project that gives a better write up, it seems that SproutCore does not work with IE6 that somewhat limits it to websites for home users and small companies. One day large corporations and government will move away from IE6, but I still see IE6 support on the spec for way too many tenders.

Answer 1

It seems like you are tired of new stuff :)

But it's a quite powerful framework which tries to go beyond DOM limitations on a web application, sproutcore has a different scope than jQuery/extJs etc., you can compare it to for example cappuccino framework but not to most known js libraries. Both have their own controls, web elements etc to create more desktop like applications on web browsers.

You can check Mozilla's Bespin project to see what can be achieved with SproutCore. And also take a look at what they have done with Cappuccino to understand why they left their jobs at Apple.

Sinan.

Answer 2

The deal with SC is that it is a fully featured MVC framework for writing RIAs. ExtJS is a collection of integrated components. MVC means that you have distinct Model, View, Controller layers.

I worked with SC for 6 months and was amazed with the effectiveness of it. In SC, when you load some model objects, the views bound those objects via controllers automatically update. You don't write any code, like you would in extjs, whereby a user does something and there is an event handler that tells all the views to update. (Or at least you write a lot less of that type of stuff).

The SC widget set is not nearly as robust as EXTs, but you can write your own views for just about anything. The other thing is that SC comes with a unit testing framework integrated. That is awesome. You can test your model code, your controller code, and view code in isolation.