The people at 280 North have released the The Cappuccino framework as open source. The Cappuccino framework is the system that powers the 280 slides web app, which is sort of Keynote in a browser.
I’ve been playing around with the framework today a bit and it looks really great. The interesting thing is how many AppKit features have made it across. It wasn’t hard to modify the sample app to use a CPURLConnection object to fetch data asynchronously and then display it in a suitable text view.
My test app for this btw was an ajax clock. I built a simple php script that displays the output of the php date method and then used ajax calls to update the clock in the browser. It’s not exactly useful but it worked really quite nicely and the coding is relatively easy too.
I’m now wondering what else can be built using these tools, because it seems a really nice way of doing web apps (if you have a desktop software background)
I’m very impressed. 🙂