Came across SproutCore, after seeing a tweet from Addy Osmani mentioning his in-progress work on the company’s blog design. Also read this thoughful article about SproutCore, and decided to try to learn this around other commitments.
First post on installation. Noob beginnings… baby on a teet. Not sure if all the below steps are the fastest way to install, but here is what I did. (Before this, I was not even familiar to terms “gem” or “Ruby gem”, so reading the SproutCore wiki initially felt like walking into a wall)
Installed Ruby 1.8.7, which my colleague mentioned was the most stable version.
After installing Ruby, I installed the Ruby development kit in a seperate “DevKit” folder on my main drive, by carefully following the instructions on the dev kit wiki and ensuring my existing Ruby 1.8.7 is successfully enhanced. Not having the dev kit threw an error during SproutCore Gem installation.
I also installed Gem through the zip file on rubygems.org, I could then continue with the instructions on SproutCore wiki to install SproutCore through it’s gem. (Finding out and adding the company’s proxy was an important step)
Followed the steps as per the Get Started guide to test:
- type “sc-init hello_world” in prompt (creating the application called hello world, this will create a hello_world folder @ your command prompt location)
- cd into the hello_world folder
- type “sc-server” to run the application in http://localhost:4020/hello_world
Done!
Update:
SproutCore vs jQuery + Backbone.js – Some interesting and substantial negative comments here, which made me re-think using SproutCore for the “inflexibility in interface design patterns” as a front-end developer. This comment posted recently in Jan 19, 2011 from the post was also of concern:
“I did 6 months developing a Sproutcore based app ending a couple months ago. I learned a lot and it definitely made me think about javascript differently. That said I’d recommend against it based on my experience. It’s an awesome idea, and hopefully one day will fully deliver, but the project isn’t sufficiently mature yet. We regularly ran up against edge cases that required us to spend time fixing Sproutcore rather than fixing our own code.”
At the end of the day, my consolation was getting past the installation and a few tutorials… and understanding to a small degree how SproutCore is meant to work. I’m still very much biased towards custom, light-weight, re-useable UI handcrafted with html/jQuery/CSS.
