June 2008 Archives

About 18 months ago, I posted the then-new Mailroom 2.0 and the new approach we had taken to building it called the JavaScript Application. In a post called JavaScript Applications vs Ajax I wrote:

Mailroom is certainly not the only JavaScript Application out there. ... But we do hope that Mailroom will be a shining example of what JSApps are capable of, and why we think they are the future of web apps for business in general.

For the last 18-months we’ve been developing on these ideas internally along with some other folks who thought our ideas were interesting too. The result is a new open-source framework that we announced a few months ago and that will go 1.0 in a few weeks called SproutCore. And boy it is getting some attention.

I can’t really tell you much more about who is using SproutCore or what they are doing with it, but I can point you to some great articles. This one is my favorite so far: Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore.

We started Sproutit in part because we believe that bringing desktop-like business applications to the web would open them up to a whole new audience of small and medium-size businesses. It turned out that the technology we needed to do this didn’t exist yet.

Now with SproutCore it does.