Cheers.

Why Objective-J – FF 3.1 beta와 Mac Safari에서 280slides 써봤는데 훌륭하다! IE8은 글쎄…..

Now if we could only have a standard for vectors (svg) on the web, yeah, I’m talking to you Webkit!

If you’re looking just to replace a user’s private desktop application, this isn’t necessarily an issue, but if your business model is still based in part around making content available on the web, or attracting traffic from search engines, this is a significant downside.

Not that this is a problem for all of these frameworks – those which compile to Javascript and can run code on both the server and client side (like GWT) should give more flexibility.

But I think I still have a case in saying that we shouldn’t change things too quickly. I do agree with you – the status quo is not ideal, and it is boring to keep using it. However, I would look at this work as a transition – improvement as a process, not an event – so that instead of simply releasing “Version 2.0″ we’re evolving the interfaces we currently use. For now, we’re just changing the layer below the interface. Ideally, this should be as transparent as possible, in order to cause the least disruption to the users who need to keep doing all their stuff – they can’t afford to have downtime. The more downtime they have – think re-training, re-education and system upgrades, the more money they lose in unproductive time.

I do think this use of web technology is exciting (if only for us developers) because we can get people to start trusting the Internet for more than just serving static documents. Once people start using it for richer and richer applications, they’ll start appreciating the advantages, and then (fingers crossed) even funding its improvement, especially in regards to speed… and where the real money has to be spent – on infrastructure (think about widespread fibre optic!). Then we can have all the real advantages, like true data portability – forget carrying around fragile CDs or portable hard drives. Installation becomes a thing of the past, you’ll never lose your data, media sharing becomes much easier… you name it.

So I think that while this isn’t the final word by any means, it is a step in the right direction. What do you think?

I’m not saying that familiarity is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just not very exciting, and it’s absolutely not the revolution Ryan is touting it as. It’s just a convenient way for apple to duplicate their existing interface work directly on the web, including the good and the bad along with it. But why this would be a compelling use case for the rest of the web industry is an argument that has simply not been made.

Is there a package you can grab with all you need to get started?

Are there tutorials out there?

In looking back, I think I worded that wrong and I agree that you were in no way suggesting that everything should look the same. Please accept my apologies about that.

I do feel that the explosion that was Web 2.0 had to be attributed in some part to the community doing a hard shift away from the Microsoft and Java solutions of the world because they desired to have more flexibility and freedom in the front-end development.

The issue with solutions like .NET is that they seek to constrain the interface while making the back-end wide open. This is backwards to the creative needs of the community in my opinion and my only concern with the “abstracting away” of the nuts and bolts is that it will begin to remove flexibility.

Abstraction of the front-end world is more tricky because there are such nuances that have to be considered. Granted, there are some people that like paint-by-number, but there are many others that like the blank canvas approach.

It’ll help people that already code cocoa apps to ease into web development, the same way ASP.NET has let windows programmers do web development, and GWT for Java developers. I predict the same levels of crimes against usability, accessibility, performance, and web architecture as we’ve seen in the past.

The only real advantage these sorts of frameworks offer over their desktop counterparts is zero installation, and, occasionally, sidestepping the usability nightmare that is filesystems. These advantages were already there for plain vanilla web apps, and didn’t need a fancy framework to provide them. All the other various advantages of the “webpage” paradigm are thrown out with the bathwater, without stopping to think, “Just what is so great about desktop applications anyway?”

Seriously, why are desktop-like applications so desirable? Is it the animations? The responsiveness? Undo/Redo is nice, copy/paste is another usability problem, but neither of those features are especially difficult to achieve with just plain vanilla javascript. I don’t think it’s really any of those things. it’s more likely about the comfort that the familiar provides. It’s the window, and the close button, and the toolbar, and everything else that reminds you of being in a familiar environment. That’s okay, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this is a revolution. It’s comfort food, nothing new.

I am quite surprised Apple chose not to use Objective-J or Cappuccino to build Mobile Me, and perhaps if they were released to the public earlier in Mobile Me’s development cycle, I reckon they would have been the chosen tools.

The benefits of using these frameworks should not be compared, however, to the benefits of Adobe AIR – these are different concepts. AIR is all about building installable cross-platform desktop apps, Objective-J and SproutCore are frameworks entirely in the browser and not, as such, “platforms”. These frameworks are pushing the boundaries of the web *so* far that I can’t see AIR ever becoming a success.

The power to developers that is being provided by these open source frameworks is a wake up call to Adobe and Microsoft with their proprietary technologies (Flash and Silverlight). Many smaller apps are now able to be replaced by web versions, and Apple has seen this relatively early on. Looking at Microsoft, they’re internet presence is more focused on search and “crushing Google”, not improving their ailing software strategies.

You asked “Why is there such a strong desire to have one design, one way, one approach for applications.”

I’m not promoting one way for all those things. What I’m excited about is abstracting development away from some of the nuts and bolts that have already been built (and built well).

We need to focus more on building innovative apps, instead of re-inventing the low level components and design elements.

@Ryan: I agree, it is cool that people are constantly pushing the limits of the web. We have a constant debate about doing stuff that’s webby, meaning that just cloning the desktop UI and showing it in the browser often misses out on the best pieces of the web. Also, things like back button support, accessibility, vector graphics, animations, etc., are all things that are solved by toolkits like Dojo that really let you choose how desktop-ish you want your web app to be. The new objective-c and cocoa toolkits are interesting in unifying the programming approach for Apple desktop devs. It’s also interesting to see if going the other direction, with really good JavaScript bindings for Cocoa in Leopard, making it quite a bit easier to use web technologies to create nice desktop apps on OS X.

I believe GWT has a good support for accessibility and internationalization.

@Scott

I don’t mind developing it using Java (as opposed to Objective-J?). You get a lot of things from that: solid debugger, solid IDE, solid framework. Sure, you can’t do heavy meta-programming that you could in JS, but there’s not much of meta-programming needed anyway when you’re building a simple UI.

@Dylan + Ryan

I don’t mean to be rude, I think Dojo is a great framework. But I felt that there are differences between the Dojo-like frameworks versus GWT, Objective-J.

The latter group provides a way to do JS via some other languages. They’re more of a platform than a JS library/framework. So I think Ryan is kind of right for mentioning Objective-J/Cappuccino as something new.

@JasonMcCay

I develop UI using GWT + Ext-GWT everyday and I do share your sentiment once in a while: “is it necessary to make this look exactly like a desktop app but supports history and probably supports offline as well?”

It’s been a painful experience for me to support both web and desktop mindset/features. Fortunately GWT, Ext-GWT and GALGears help to ease my pain.

But something I observed outside technical issues/debates. Recently I asked people who are not technical-savvy: which one you’d prefer, a desktop-like application on your browser (think of Ext-GWT/Ext-JS) or a web 2.0-like look-n-feel (think of GMail, Google Readers). They all said they prefer the web 2.0 look-n-feel because desktop-app look-n-feel reminds them of the complicated desktop software they have to deal with every single day.

On the other hand, most developers I talked to (developers, not web developers), prefer the desktop-like UI because they believe that “the browser can do better than what it is right now and we haven’t fully take advantage of it.”

Two sides of world…