02 7 / 2010
Cappuccino: Cocoa for the Web
If you haven’t seen Cappuccino yet, you should really take a look. It is an implementation of Cocoa in the web browser. First of all, it implements a new language called Objective-J, which is heavily inspired by Apple’s Objective-C. This language is implemented entirely in JavaScript, which means no preprocessing or compilation - you can just load up your Objective-J file and run away. You can read more about Objective-J here. On top of this language is the Cappuccino framework, which makes building desktop-class applications easy. You don’t have to deal with the DOM or CSS which is a big win for me, and it comes with features built right in, such as copy and paste, and undo/redo.
There have been some great applications built with Cappuccino since it was released almost two years ago. The first of these, of course, is 280slides, built by the team that built Cappuccino and Objective-J, 280North. The first thing that you will notice about Cappuccino applications is how much like native applications they feel. They are blazing fast, and are very intuitive - things that you expect to work in a native application just do in Cappuccino apps. Below, is a list of some of the other Cappuccino applications that I have seen.
- TimeTable - a time tracking app
- Observer - an awesome web analytics app
- Github Issues - what it sounds like, works both in the browser and in the desktop thanks to the NativeHost technology
The Cappuccino team is awesome. You should check out their work. The entire project is open source, so if you fancy working on a relatively large project, you can check out the code on Github. If you want to learn more about Cappuccino and Objective-J, the website has a great section on the topic. Awesome work!
