SproutCore is an HTML5 application framework for building responsive, desktop-caliber apps in any modern web browser, without plugins.
Background
When the web started, it was a collection of hyperlinked, static pages. Then people started creating dynamic content and applications, and the web overflowed with cgi-bin directories.
The techniques for building these applications have become more advanced since then, with full-stack web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django becoming immensely popular. As the number of web users has grown, however, web apps have experienced difficulty scaling to fulfill the demand that a popular app can generate.
Even with consistently fast servers, the latency between those servers and your user is always outside your control. That means that even if you optimize your application as much as possible, every new request makes the user wait a minimum of a few hundred milliseconds. Compared to desktop apps, they just don’t feel as snappy, and impatient users can quickly turn into former users.
Recently, AJAX has been used to create web pages that can update without having to reload the browser. But they still feel like websites, and are usually limited in interactivity.
Now, Development Positions
SproutCore works by doing the only thing that can truly eliminate the latency problem: it moves your business logic to the client. SproutCore applications are full-fledged programs, written in JavaScript. That JavaScript executes in your user’s browser, freeing up your servers (and server engineers) to focus on what’s most important in a cloud application: delivering users’ data as quickly and reliably as possible.
But SproutCore isn’t your mama’s JavaScript library. It isn’t meant to augment existing web pages. It isn’t meant to add animation to documents. SproutCore is a tool for building applications. It has more in common with Cocoa or .NET than jQuery or MooTools. Because of that, SproutCore will change the way you think about building web apps.
SproutCore is server-agnostic and will plug into your existing backend. What are you waiting for?