Book Image

SproutCore Web Application Development

By : Tyler Keating
Book Image

SproutCore Web Application Development

By: Tyler Keating

Overview of this book

SproutCore is a framework that exists to allow developers to deliver on the promise of the Web with more than just simple attractive demos, but with complex software and remarkable user experiences. SproutCore’s creators recognized early on that developing real web software requires the same software development tools and practices that have evolved over decades in the native software field and thus SproutCore brings these to the Web. SproutCore Web Application Development is more than just a guide to one of the largest and most powerful web application frameworks out there, it’s also a guide to writing genre defining web applications and solving the unique problems that the web platform creates. Containing the results of thousands of hours of software development experience, this book is invaluable for anyone already writing software for the Web or just starting out. SproutCore Web Application Development comprises of three sections. In the first section we introduce SproutCore and walk through a simple SproutCore application. From there, we look in detail at all of the main components of the framework before finally working through a rigorous real-world example from start to finish. Learning about SproutCore means learning about writing software for the Web. In this book, you will not only learn what sets SproutCore apart from other web libraries and frameworks, you will also learn about solving the difficult challenges that web development poses. We will look at all the components of an application and how to translate wireframes, mocks, and design descriptions into clean, efficient, and maintainable code using MVC, data adaptors, statecharts, and more. We will look at SproutCore’s powerful binding and observing and watch how changes propagate across our app effortlessly and magically with very little code. By the time you complete SproutCore Web Application Development, you’ll be ready to develop your own application that redefines what it means to be a web application.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
SproutCore Web Application Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Binding properties for error-free consistency


At this point, we've already got a great toolkit for working with the properties of our SC.Object subclasses, but we don't yet have the proper means to connect separate object properties together. This is where we will turn to SproutCore's bindings. Bindings are another one of those framework features that native software developers have enjoyed for some time, but have not been available in a web framework. I say enjoy for good reason, bindings makes up for clean and magical code. As it turns out, SproutCore's bindings were actually modeled on and so I've heard, improved upon the binding system in Cocoa.

Let's look at why bindings are so important. Here's a screenshot of a SproutCore application of mine called Hubbub.

What we're looking at is an item that has been lent out and I've highlighted five areas in red on the screen. These five areas share something in common; they all depend on the isBorrowed property of the selected item. Now if I were...