By Rainy Day on

There is an emerging Open Source Web 3.0 Cocoa-like frameworks known as SproutCore, which might best be described as an “easy to use ‘AJAX on steroids’.” With SproutCore a much more sophisticated and user friendly UI can be implemented on the client-side, while improving overall server-side performance (because much of the work once performed on the server-side is transferred to the client-side).

Perhaps just as significant is the ease with which complex interface elements can be coded. According to their website, “SproutCore is a framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code. It can help you build full ‘thick’ client applications in the web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data. JavaScript applications are faster, easier to use, and a lot easier to write than complicated Ajax-driven applications. When you use a framework like SproutCore to help you, they can also be a lot of fun to write.”

Also significant is that Apple is a contributor to the SproutCore project, and has contributed major performance updates and added much new functionality. Indeed Apple’s new Web 3.0 app’s in the newly announced OS-agnostic MobileMe service is SproutCore-based. So SproutCore has some heavyweight backing and is likely to be well supported.

So it should be possible to deliver a Drupal with more elegant and sophisticated UI features while increasing the performance of the system overall. I hope that the Drupal 8 developers seriously consider using SproutCore technology. It will further distance Drupal from the competition.

Comments

majortom’s picture

majortom commented

Drupal 8 is quite far off. Why not consider it as part of Drupal 7, and even see what can be done with it for Drupal 6? I have certainly seen some amazing things done using it and would welcome its use with Drupal.

Rainy Day’s picture

Rainy Day commented

I thought Drupal 7 was farther along in development when i wrote that. You are correct: Why wait?

Question is: How many core Drupal developers know about SproutCore?

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Why not just start with a working contrib module? If you get that out there to demonstrate it's usefulness, you can work towards core from there.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

webdevbyjoss’s picture

webdevbyjoss commented

IMHO, - actually Drupal can have its own low level framework.

Its not a good time to talk about things like that, but if Drupal 8 architect team will decide that it will be based on some of existing PHP frameworks the only reasonable solution will be Zend Framework

pyxio’s picture

pyxio commented

What the heck are you talking about? Sproutcore is a JavaScript generator. What does that have to do with Zend? Zend is great but these are two different frameworks we're talking about here.