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Comment by necubi | Hacker News Reader

I've been doing a lot of sproutcore development in last six months, and I can say it's a really powerful platform. The docs aren't great, but once you get you're head around it it's very productive.

For me, it feels like the biggest paradigm shift since Rails. Rails made it easy write dynamic ajax-based websites, but they were still websites. With SproutCore, you're truly writing web applications, which run entirely in the browser and only go to the server for data. This means desktop-level responsiveness.

Congratulations for the dev team on the release, and I look forward to the exciting stuff to come in 1.1!

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> you're truly writing web applications, which run entirely in the browser and only go to the server for data

I see this as a huge step backwards towards client/server. The web is a win because it's made of addressable, reusable semantic resources in open formats. Instead web apps ship data around in undocumented and unstable formats which are only understood by one ephemeral piece of code that you have to trust. If this really catches on it will wreck the web, leaving us only with the same pile of siloed apps we had in 1990 (but without the native code).

Do you mean that reading in html (data with formatting mixed in) is preferable to reading JSON or XML? AJAX / AJAJ? What I am trying to say is I think eval(JSON) or parsing XML is > scraping HTML.

The lesson I took from the MS Office XML fiasco is that a poorly abstracted single-client data model remains impenetrable no matter how you serialize it. It's not impossible to commit to a documented and stable wire format behind a web app, but almost nobody has the diligence to actually do it when it's so much easier to make random changes and then tweak your own client code to handle whatever you did (instantly making your client the only one that still works). Before javascript happened, HTML wasn't that easy to scrape, but it at least had the virtue of forcing everyone to generate output that made some kind of sense without first being munged by one idiosyncratic piece of code.

Writing a proper SC or Capp app is easiest if you're working against a fleshed out set of APIs. Then the web app is just another data consumer, like an iPhone app. If anything I see this pushing more web sites to release solid JSON or XML based web services, not fewer.

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