Cappuccino officialy turned one last Friday. I suppose that technically Cappuccino is quite a bit older, but a year ago was when we finally released it into the open source community. It’s unbelievable to me that in just one year we went from being a completely unkown technology to one of the most popular JavaScript projects on GitHub. I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I can remember that just a few weeks before launching, the guys over at Heroku were still convincing us that we needed to switch from svn to git. Good times.

I’d like to take a step back and go over just some of the things that have happened with Cappuccino in the past year:

• We released one of our coolest tools: nib2cib. nib2cib actually lets you visually build your Cappuccino apps using Apple’s Interface Builder!
• We added a much requested theming engine. With the help of our friends over at Sofa, we also launched Aristo, a beautiful new open source UI to serve as the default look and feel for Cappuccino apps.
• We added native debugging and profiling support for Objective-J in WebKit, which now ships standard with Safari.
• We’ve begun to integrate some of the cool new features from HTML 5 into Cappuccino, like native drag and drop.
• We added KVC and KVO (key value coding and observing), to help you automatically propagate and sync changes from your models to your views.

But most importantly we’ve built an amazing community. People have really stepped in to fill the gaps in the Cappuccino environment, writing tutorials, filming screencasts, and of course creating awesome apps. Another place the community really outdid themselves is backend technologies. We originally wrote Cappuccino with the express intent of being completely server agnostic. Since then, backend support has been added for Java, Rails, and just recently Lift. We’ve even written an Objective-J module for the emerging CommonJS server-side JavaScript standard to get Cappuccino running on the backend too. The best part of course, is that people are contributing code faster than we can integrate it (we promise to get the fork queue back down to zero!). People have been working on core features in Cappuccino that I never imagined anyone outside the members of the core team tackling.

This year has truly been great and I’m incredibly thankful to everyone that has used and contributed to Cappuccino. But next year is going to be even better. We have so much planned for this project and the vision is far from complete. It’s already the case that building Cappuccino apps is a fundamentally different experience than any other web framework out there. It amazes me that someone can pick up a copy of Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming and use it to throw together a web app using drag and drop in no time. But just wait to see what’s in store. If you took a look at us when we first launched but never gave it a shot, or just haven’t had time to play around with it yet, now is a great time to join the party!

- Francisco

We’re pleased to announce the immediate release of Cappuccino 0.7, the latest update to the Cappuccino web framework. This release has been five months in the making, and it marks a significant step forward for the project.

0.7 By The Numbers

As of version 0.6, Cappuccino had 9 total contributors. Version 0.7 more than triples that number with 29 total contributors. And thanks to the inspiration and hard work of Xavier Noria and José Espinal, we’ve got a slick new website that keeps up to date tallies on all of the contributors to the project. Check it out here. If you find a mistake, be sure to let us know in the comments.

This release includes over 100 bug fixes, thanks in part to all the new contributors, and to the hard work of users taking the time to file quality bug reports. If you hadn’t noticed already, we’ve moved to github’s new issue tracking for bug reports, so check out the new system, and vote on issues that are important to you.

New Look

The biggest new feature of Cappuccino is our new new theme: Aristo. Aristo is the new look and feel for Cappuccino applications. Created by the talented designers at Sofa, Aristo is designed specifically to look good in the browser, and in any browser, whether it’s Firefox, Safari, or even Internet Explorer, Mac and Windows. We’ve also open-sourced the PSD file used to create Aristo. All the controls have been updated to use the new style, and we’ve added a few new controls as well, like checkboxes, radio buttons, and segmented controls.

Theming

We didn’t just build one new look for Cappuccino, though. Instead, we built an entirely new theme engine which will let anyone create a theme for Cappuccino. All the properties of the standard controls are fully themeable in all the different “theme states” (like “pushed”, “disabled”, “normal”, etc.). In the coming months, we’ll be sharing new themes with the community, and building a site for users to post their own themes for others to download and use.

Interface Builder

Those of you who come from a Cocoa background are used to using Apple’s Interface Builder tool to layout your Cocoa applications. Thanks to a technology in 0.7 called nib2cib, you can use Interface Builder to layout Cappuccino applications too. All of the classes supported in Cappuccino 0.7 that have Cocoa analogues are included. So, you can drag checkboxes, sliders, text fields, buttons, and lots more. You can even instantiate custom top level objects, or custom view subclasses, which will be converted to the right class in Cappuccino by the nib2cib tool. Once you’re done laying out the UI of your application with Interace Builder, you can use it’s target-action and outlet technology to build up its logic as well.

nib2cib is a powerful tool that drastically reduces the amount of code you need to write to build an interface with Cappuccino. The starter package now includes both a nib/xib based application template, and a standard, code based template, so you can choose which is best for you. From the command line you can use the new capp tool to generate a nib/xib project by typing “capp gen -t NibApplication MyApp”.

The Rest

As if that wasn’t enough, there are a lot more changes. First off, improved support for debugging in Cappuccino and Objective-J, thanks to some contributions to WebKit. For more details, see Francisco’s post on the topic.

We now build on top of Rake instead of ant, which has helped us create a much better build system that can improve quickly. Objective-J has improved support for deploying code to multiple platforms, like server (e.g. rhino) and browser. And we’re including the new Narwhal JavaScript standard library in Cappuccino as an external dependency.

Narwhal is still in the early stages, but eventually it will be a set of standard JavaScript APIs that work consistently across many different JavaScript implementations, making it easy to work on any JavaScript interpreter you have available. We’ll write more about all these new features as time goes on, especially all the new tools and APIs in 0.7, so stay tuned. In the mean time, you can check out information we’ve posted to the wiki.

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed to Cappuccino for the 0.7 release, and to everyone using Cappuccino!

- Ross

A few days ago we posted a beta of the upcoming 0.7 release to github. We sent out some information to the mailing list and posted some info on the wiki as well.

Thomas Balthazar has also recapped a lot of the information in his latest installment of This Week in Cappuccino Edge. I encourage you to check it out and let us know how 0.7 beta is shaping up!

Over at 280 North, we announced our next product, called Atlas, at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami this week.

Atlas is a visual development tool for creating web applications using the Cappuccino framework. The best way to explain Atlas is to show it:

Think Vitamin has an article discussing Atlas in more detail.

We’re really excited about the ways Atlas could change the process of developing web applications. Atlas will allow developers to worry less about boilerplate user interface and glue code, just as the Cappuccino framework gives developers many common features expected by users, letting them focus on the ones specific to their applications.

Furthermore, Atlas allows non-programmers, such as many graphic designers, to join in on the process of actually building an application, rather than just providing mockups that must then be replicated in code by a developer.

Atlas will be available this summer. Sign up for updates on 280atlas.com and we’ll let you know of the progress on Atlas.

Thomas Balthazar, who’s been doing the recent “This Week in Edge Cappuccino” series (read this week’s post), also started a new site to host screencasts of Cappuccino & Objective-J tutorials. So far he’s created a screencast for the starter tutorial. 

We’re all looking forward to seeing more screencasts on the site, and if you want to contribute your own screencast, get in touch with Thomas and he’ll add it to the site. Thanks Thomas!

Thomas Balthazar has begun a weekly series of posts describing the latest development in Cappuccino. Be sure to check it out to find out what’s going on.