Big News from Cappuccino: Aristo and Atlas
As it turns out, the Cappuccino team has been busy hacking away on some very impressive stuff. Today at the Future of Web Apps Miami, they announced Aristo and Atlas.
Aristo
Cappuccino worked with the popular design firm Sofa to create Aristo, a new open-source look-and-feel that will be freely available, including the source PSD files complete with all layers intact. Anyone may use the look in their own projects. I didn’t get a close look at the theme, but it seemed quite nice.
Atlas
Atlas continues Cappuccino’s efforts to essentially port Apple’s Cocoa stack to the Web. Atlas itself looks like a mash-up of Flex Builder and Interface Builder, all running in a browser, but continues to hew very closely to Interface Builder’s approach. For example, just as with Interface Builder, you can bind properties on components to other components or to code through visual drag-and-drop operations (complete with the same blue connector line).
What’s more, Atlas introduces the equivalent of Interface Builder’s “nib” file (though I forget what their version is called).
In a live demo, Francisco Tolmasky built an RSS reader using an entirely visual approach. Francisco made it clear that he doesn’t think code will go away, but instead, he feels the amount of code required to create a web application will dramatically decrease.
They also released a screencast:
Multi-platform Support, including iPhone JavaScript Wrappers
Atlas also supports targeting multiple platforms, letting you create different interface files that bind to the same back-end code. They’ve even bridged native APIs and exposed them to the JavaScript environment and provide a PhoneGap-like way to run such applications as native iPhone applications. Wow.
It’s hard to overstate how impressive the Atlas demo was; the release should be coming at some point in summer 2009.
Great job guys!
