This could be a killer app for business applications.
Having the development environment hooked up to the visual mockup designer is a key element for quickly bringing apps that the business likes and IT approves of.
If they can get this right, there is a lot of money here. Especially considering the amount of lazy IT shops out there.
Flex is very nice, but Flex uses a flash plugin as it's runtime. A flex application is compiled binary sent to the browser - doesn't sound very dynamic or open web to me.
Cappucino uses good old XHTML and javascript. If you look at browser advancements in Javascript just in the past few months alone, 2 years from now technologies like flash may only be useful for very niche circumstances.
Does it really? When I view source on http://280slides.com/Editor/ I don't see much HTML. Does Atlas generate HTML or something else? In what ways does Cappucino participate in the open Web?
View source will only show the state of the HTML before Javascript renders the rest of the HTML. Check out the application using firebug (firefox plugin) and look at the HTML that is actually being rendered. Lots of div's for the layout of course and a few canvas elements (i think those are for the slide rendering).
While it may not be the most readable XHTML in the world - at least it doesn't use a plugin to do that work.
Yes, it does really use HTML and JavaScript. Cappuccino "participates" in the open web as much as any other application written on top of open web technologies.
Isn't objective-J translated to javascript by a sort of compiler? in that case you can't easily re-use pieces of code and use them in your javascript application.
That's the problem with desktop-like UI, it's created by lazy developers. They used and learnt RAD ten years ago and they don't want to bother to learn HTML and how the web works.
Lazy developers are something corporations and IT departments have to live with. The good ones leave and end up working for startups or go independent.
The great thing about an IDE like this is that it can be a foundation for RAD projects - it could let IT departments finally move those aging VB6 / Access applications to the web.
Or any kind of application thanks to the mess of standards that web developers have had to deal with. Atlas and Flex are an imperfect workaround for that problem.
Having the development environment hooked up to the visual mockup designer is a key element for quickly bringing apps that the business likes and IT approves of.
If they can get this right, there is a lot of money here. Especially considering the amount of lazy IT shops out there.