Comments on: Audible Ajax Episode 27: SproutCore with Charles Jolley

By: MacMania

MacMania — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:07:10 +0000

This guy is hilarious : it’s been a while since I listen to a tech podcast and got so much laugh !
He is saying that desktop are not waiting for the mail server to reply in order to compose a mail : dude composing a mail from a desktop app does not require talking to a mail server !!

Then he is saying that they have an app ‘internally’ that can render 5000 images in 200 milli seconds (I like the ‘internally’ aka why is it so secret)… OK it’s not really rendering the 5000 images because it’s doing lazy loading/scrolling but then can he explain why the .Mac Web Gallery that is available right now is using a system of batch when there is many many images and why the hell the page take a lot more than 200 milli seconds to appear. If the framework was so powerful and so fast don’t you think that it could have been used on existing apps?

Honestly having such laugh listening to a podcast does not happen often… so I give credits where it’s due… And the dude should apply for working at Microsoft with so much BS/vaporware he is talking about!

I can’t wait for MobileMe to be released and see how really SproutCore behave in real life ! my feeling is MobileMe may be called ImmobileMe

By: MatsSvensson

MatsSvensson — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:24:49 +0000

Too bad their stuff doesnâ€™t work *at all* in my browser, IE6.
Not even any error messages, just empty or partly populated pages.

(And no Iâ€™m NOT switching to some other browser, they all blow too much to be worth the migration)

Also their webpage seems pretty badly designed.
For example almost all links are scrubbed squeaky clean from everything that makes them look like links, some stay secret even when you mouse over them.

And the XHTML is also broken and bloated, if you have to nit pick (even more) =)

I got it working in FF, but it seems awfully slow and unintuitive to use compared to a normal webpage.

No open in new window/tab,
no back button,
lots of lag in basic things like scrollbars,
right-click makes a left-click too sometimes, etc.

I think all these â€œdesktop app in a browserâ€-frameworks often seem to wind up combining a lot of the worst from both worlds.

At least in this framework it seems you can select things and apply functionality in the context menu to content. Most other â€œweb pageâ€ apps do away with the DOM access completely, killing all the perks with using the browser.

By: AgentG

AgentG — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:56:48 +0000

I really like the how Sprout apps run in a modern browser. But they seem to leave behind the concept of unobtrusive javascript in a big way. Concepts like moving style to external style sheets and using semantic html fly out the window as well… So I guess I was hoping for something that output a bit more elegant code.

By: whyisjasontaken

whyisjasontaken — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:36:54 +0000

While I am quite interested in Sprout, the fact that their only online demo is noticeably buggy isn’t a particularly encouraging fact. Now, while I’m not blaming this on the framework itself, it not a fantastic first impression.

By: Schill

Schill — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:36:45 +0000

I can relate on writing JS-heavy, “desktop-like” apps – it’s not easy. I worked on the new Yahoo! Photos (3.0) redesign back in 2006 (see a fun UI demo etc. on the YUI Blog), and we were constantly hitting browser walls, performance challenges and so on. We used event delegation, implemented destructors on our core JS objects (primarily for fighting leaks in IE 6), “progressive loading”, and so on – all elements common to desktop apps.

It was a lot of fun and a great challenge, but it was an uphill battle trying to maintain both an ever-growing “state”, and performance, simultaneously, without a page unload/refresh.

In fact, it was the pandora’s box of trying to maintain a “single-page experience” which I think was the largest learning/takeaway from the whole thing – that being I think it’s a slippery slope.

I’m still not convinced that the browser is ready for the “desktop” world, but we’re certainly closer to the dream now than we were back in 2005.