Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anyone know of any large projects using Objective-J / Cappuccino besides 280North?
Were currently using it: http://stylous.com/
For 10x better usability, pre-cache your images!
New Product From 280North: Atlas
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#32Very nice, although the demo seems a bit overly-staged. My prediction: the quality of their debugger will make or break this company.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#33Very snazzy!
I don't know how y'all plan to make money, but don't get too caught up in dev tools! They're fun, and might be good marketing, but be sure they're actually saving time against making the thing that people with money actually want.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#34This really is amazing. But it makes me nervous. I'm open to the idea, but just as I prefer using a text editor to write my HTML code rather than Dreamweaver, I'm concerned that this can take me too far away from my web app code. Like any other tool, in order to use it effectively you have to master the tool just like you'd master a language. Hopefully what's under the hood here and the code it generates makes it eas…
In order to build views with Cappuccino today, I'm doing it by hand (i.e. subclassing for example a CPView and constructing child visuals) - this means instancing elements such as CPTextField, CPButton, etc. and adding it to a view.
But being able to do it visually ala Interface Builder with similar semantics around delegates, subclassing, IBAction and Outlet concepts will rock - speeding up development time tremendously.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#35I love what these guys are doing - I'm just not sold on the whole Objective-J thing.
Somebody should write an equivalent which will create Rails views.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#36Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
But was NeWS a good idea? It seemed excessively complex to me, just like AJAX.
I didn't mean to imply it was a good idea, just that this model, like X Windows, has already been tried before (and found wanting?).
The one difference is that everyone has and knows how to use a browser, or what to do if you tell them to open myfoo.com.
What percentage of the computer population knows what X Windows is, much less has any idea how to use it?
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#38That's pretty amazing. It's like Interface Builder but for Cappuccino ... and as a web app. I can't believe how awesome these guys are, I hope Apple acquires them and starts using their technology for MobileMe + iWork.
If you knew anything about what happened to WebObjects, you would be hoping that such a scenario never occurred.
We don't plan on creating a Java version of Cappuccino and killing off the Objective-J API any time soon ;)
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#39These guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them.
The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of little sliders and lines and bars and shapes and then click over there in that text box to enter a name and then select this or that from a list or menu, wait until that three pixel graphic changes its shape into a handle so you can drag that line over here, etc, and there's no way to automate this.
It's a matter of taste whether you like to do it that way when you create _one_ form, but once you create an application or two or three you have to abstract from the repeating patterns and you can't do that with the GUI builder.
GUI builders make you stay on the same level of abstraction forever because they don't have the equivalent of meta programming or even just plain procedural programming.
The reason why code built with GUI builders is so awful is not so much that they necessarily generate bad code. It's that developers who can put up with repeating the same clicks and drags on the same level of abstraction for years and years are in the wrong profession and create bad code regardless of the tools.
Programming is all about abstracting and automating stuff. The pinnacle of GUI builder based abstraction is what Microsoft calls "user controls". All they abstract is a bunch of widgets statically glued together on a panel. Great, but that's like 5% of what you want to do.
I'm afraid GUI builders are hopeless for any serious programming.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#40These guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them. The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of litt…
I agree with a lot of what you say here, and have had much the same experience, but there is one powerful counter-example in Apple's "Interface Builder". I get the impression that most Cocoa developers use it for at least some part of their code.