CappCon 2011 On the Fringe - Pushing the Web to its Limits

http://blip.tv/cappcon/cappcon-2011-austin-sarner-on-the-fringe-5443476

by tolmasky • 15 years ago

26 13 15 years ago

blip.tv

tolmasky• 15 years ago

Everything they show here is available as open source at:

https://github.com/austinsarner/Frappuccino https://github.com/austinsarner/RunKit

WingTsun• 15 years ago

do you know how run it?

I got CPInvalidArgumentException: attempt to insert nil or undefined

DanielRibeiro4• 15 years ago

I can't help but think that Cappuccino, and GWT for that matter, would be much more successful if they decoupled language and toolkit. If objective-j would run on node.js, like Clojure and Coffeescript, it would probably get more traction.

And if the toolkits were language agnostic (meaning you could easily write in haxe, coffeescript, clojurescript, or any other language on top of js [1]), it would have a bigger market.

I know that Cappuccino and GWT are older than node.js, but it is not too late to change.

[1] https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

dstein• 15 years ago

I think the bigger problem is Objective-C isn't a desirable programming language to begin with, and therefore another language based on it is even less desirable.

justinvoss• 15 years ago

That's very much a matter of opinion. Personally, I would rather write Objective-C/J than Javascript.

boucher• 15 years ago

Objective-J is decoupled from Cappuccino. It runs completely independently, and even has a command line utility available built on top of Narwhal (a command line JS environment we built before Node was an option). Objective-J should absolutely be made to run on node, and that's being done as part of our rewrite, Objective-J 2.0.

As far as the other direction is concerned, you can write code on top of the Cappuccino framework in any language you can get running in the browser. The problem with writing in vanilla JavaScript, as opposed to Objective-J, is just that there are missing features which require the use of fairly obnoxious syntax in JavaScript.

A ruby to JavaScript compiler would provide a great language alternative to Objective-J for targeting Cappuccino. In fact, you can build a reasonable subset of ruby on top of Objective-J (see https://github.com/tlrobinson/cappruby, ala MacRuby).

DanielRibeiro4• 15 years ago

Thanks for the comprehensive overview of what is going on cappuccino land.

Regarding the missing features on vanilla JS: it is ok. More powerful languages on top of JS might have them, and having a common ground to compile to would make the toolkit more hospitable to a polyglot environment.

Edit: It is also important to note that Javascript supports metaprogramming as powerful as LISP macros. This is because functions implement toString method. Coffeekup [1] is a beautiful DSL for writing web pages in Coffeescript that uses this feature quite successfully. Therefore I'd really like to see which JS missing features can't be supplanted by AST manipulation, like the one you'd do in Scheme, Clojure or Common Lisp.

GWT had this very same issue: by choosing source code compile, languages like Clojure, Scala, Groovy and JRuby were removed from the ecosystem. Which is really harming for open source projects, where the more people you reach, the more help you get.

Heroku's founder Adam Wiggins wrote a lot about this Polyglot environment a couple of days ago on: Polyglot Platform [2]

[1] http://coffeekup.org/

[2] http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/8/3/polyglot_platform/

joely• 15 years ago

Cappuccino really delivers. And you're doing it again here!

CappCon 2011 On the Fringe - Pushing the Web to its Limits

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