Cappuccino officialy turned one last Friday. I suppose that technically Cappuccino is quite a bit older, but a year ago was when we finally released it into the open source community. It’s unbelievable to me that in just one year we went from being a completely unkown technology to one of the most popular JavaScript projects on GitHub. I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I can remember that just a few weeks before launching, the guys over at Heroku were still convincing us that we needed to switch from svn to git. Good times.
I’d like to take a step back and go over just some of the things that have happened with Cappuccino in the past year:
- We released one of our coolest tools: nib2cib. nib2cib actually lets you visually build your Cappuccino apps using Apple’s Interface Builder!
- We added a much requested theming engine. With the help of our friends over at Sofa, we also launched Aristo, a beautiful new open source UI to serve as the default look and feel for Cappuccino apps.
- We added native debugging and profiling support for Objective-J in WebKit, which now ships standard with Safari.
- We’ve begun to integrate some of the cool new features from HTML 5 into Cappuccino, like native drag and drop.
- We added KVC and KVO (key value coding and observing), to help you automatically propagate and sync changes from your models to your views.
But most importantly we’ve built an amazing community. People have really stepped in to fill the gaps in the Cappuccino environment, writing tutorials, filming screencasts, and of course creating awesome apps. Another place the community really outdid themselves is backend technologies. We originally wrote Cappuccino with the express intent of being completely server agnostic. Since then, backend support has been added for Java, Rails, and just recently Lift. We’ve even written an Objective-J module for the emerging CommonJS server-side JavaScript standard to get Cappuccino running on the backend too. The best part of course, is that people are contributing code faster than we can integrate it (we promise to get the fork queue back down to zero!). People have been working on core features in Cappuccino that I never imagined anyone outside the members of the core team tackling.
This year has truly been great and I’m incredibly thankful to everyone that has used and contributed to Cappuccino. But next year is going to be even better. We have so much planned for this project and the vision is far from complete. It’s already the case that building Cappuccino apps is a fundamentally different experience than any other web framework out there. It amazes me that someone can pick up a copy of Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming and use it to throw together a web app using drag and drop in no time. But just wait to see what’s in store. If you took a look at us when we first launched but never gave it a shot, or just haven’t had time to play around with it yet, now is a great time to join the party!
- Francisco
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