Sproutcore is a well-engineered open source framework for making web apps. However, Sproutcore apps are unlike Ajax web applications and have more in common with the apps of the "App Revolution" the mobile world has undergone in the last few years. Apps for our phones and tablets are often faster, more fluid, and more focused than Ajax web pages. Sproutcore helps you make similarly fast and fluid apps--except that you run them by visiting an ordinary web page in an ordinary web browser.
This means that Sproutcore should not be confused with a tool for making web documents; for that job you want semantic HTML progressively enhanced with carefully chosen Javascript. But in the years since it became dogma to only use such technology, the terms of engagement have changed. Broadband pipes have become bigger; browsers have gotten faster and much more sophisticated; and users have come to expect and understand app-like experiences.
A few years ago, Apple foresaw these changes and adopted Sproutcore for building Mobile Me and iWork.com. In the process Sproutcore received an enormous endowment of engineering effort and fine-tuning that you can now put to work for yourself. Using Sproutcore, you can deploy one app to all your users, whether at any moment they happen to be using Internet Explorer on a locked-down PC at work, the Android phone in their pocket, or the iPad on a friend's coffee table.
Moreover, because Sproutcore is open-source and based on HTML and Javascript, you can be sure that your app will work on new devices--even new classes of device, like multitouch tables and interactive whiteboards--for years to come.
Best of all, Sproutcore comes with a friendly, active, and growing community that will help you to make your app the best it can be.
Sproutcore achieves app-like responsiveness in ordinary browsers not by magic but by recognizing a new balance among technological factors: download throughputs and browser speeds are continually decreasing while round-trip times to servers are decreasing much more slowly. Therefore it is now often better to take a few extra milliseconds to download a fat javascript package that knows how to render and navigate among multiple screens than it is to incur the lag involved in asking the server to render a new HTML page every time the user navigates; and it can be better to pre-fetch a large amount of server-side data to your client in the background than it is to round-trip to the server every time the user touches data.
Sproutcore includes abstractions that help you write Javascript that works with the grain of these new realities. Moreover it includes libraries and a Javascript-friendly object system that help you program "in the large"; build tools that help you divide up your Javascript into manageable pieces; a unit testing framework; and deployment tools that transparently optimize the chances that clients will use a cached version of your app's code.
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Sproutcore doesn't try to be magic; it's just a large Javascript library and a well-thought out build system that supply the missing pieces you will find yourself wanting if you try to build a slick, fast app "from scratch" using only HTML, Javascript, and libraries like jQuery and jQueryUI.
Sproutcore achieves app-like responsiveness in ordinary browsers not by magic but by recognizing a new balance among technological factors: download throughputs and browser speeds are continually decreasing while round-trip times to servers are decreasing much more slowly. Therefore it is now often better to take a few extra milliseconds to download a fat javascript package that knows how to render and navigate among multiple screens than it is to incur the lag involved in asking the server to render a new HTML page every time the user navigates; and it can be better to pre-fetch a large amount of server-side data to your client in the background than it is to round-trip to the server every time the user touches data.
Sproutcore includes abstractions that help you write Javascript that works with the grain of these new realities. Moreover it includes libraries and a Javascript-friendly object system that help you program "in the large"; build tools that help you divide up your Javascript into manageable pieces; a unit testing framework; and deployment tools that transparently optimize the chances that clients will use a cached version of your app's code.
...
Sproutcore doesn't try to be magic; it's just a large Javascript library and a well-thought out build system that supply the missing pieces you will find yourself wanting if you try to build a slick, fast app "from scratch" using only HTML, Javascript, and libraries like jQuery and jQueryUI.