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SproutCore and Standards-Based Rich Internet Applications

It’s not often that I get to repudiate completely my most recent blog post a few days after publishing it. But anyone who is not yet convinced that the answer to the question of whether web apps are an endangered species is an emphatic “no” should run, not walk, to the excellent article about SproutCore on RoughlyDrafted.

In a nutshell, SproutCore is a JavaScript framework that facilitates the development of web apps that have a native application look-and-feel. It is used most notably by Apple on MobileMe. This puts the lie to my assertion from last week that “you have to be a virtual rocket scientist to achieve [the MobileMe user experience] with Ajax techniques and tools.” There’s rocket science in there, to be sure, but encapsulated in the SproutCore framework.

This is further evidence that browser capabilities are rapidly evolving to the point where user experience approaching that of a native app can be achieved with plain old HTML and JavaScript. This trend is poised to accelerate as JavaScript performance makes a quantum leap forward with the deployment of next-gen JS engines like Tamarin and SquirrelFish. Newer standards-based markup like SVG and the HTML5 <video> tag are contributing to the trend as well.

This has major implications for Apple’s multiplatform strategy that are well covered in the RoughlyDrafted article cited above:

If you were waiting for the resurrection of Yellow Box or Cocoa for Windows, stop waiting and start coding. SproutCore brings the values of Leopard’s Cocoa to the web, domesticating JavaScript into a functional application platform with lots of free built-in support for desktop features.

Being based on open web standards and being open source itself means SproutCore will enable developers to develop cross platform applications without being tied to either a plugin architecture or its vendor.

It also represents a clear competitive threat to Adobe as it pushes its platform tools for Rich Internet Application development (Flex and AIR). All things being equal, developers are likely to opt for tools that are available natively in leading browsers without the need to install additional plugins and runtimes.

Adobe shouldn’t pack it in quite yet, however. By all accounts, one of the strongest parts of their offering is their developments tools, something that is still lacking for RIA development on top of open standards. They also have a very strong development community and evangelism team that the likes of SproutCore will find it hard to duplicate (although not impossible, perhaps, with the full weight of Apple behind them leveraging the existing Cocoa community). And if the competitive threat becomes too significant, Adobe can always resort to open sourcing their Flash engine, something that would generate enormous buzz and go a long way towards alleviating the concerns of open software advocates over use of a proprietary platform.