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

Organizing panes using SC.Page


Since an application may have several different preconfigured panes and pages (that is, subclasses of SC.Pane), we need a means to organize them all. This is the purpose of the SC.Page object. But don't let the name confuse you. SC.Page is not a type of SC.View and has nothing to do with rendering the visual page. It is simply a storage object used to hold preconfigured but un-instantiated panes and views.

Using an SC.Page container gives your application an anchor point for looking up a particular view tree and retrieving it for use. This is convenient, but the real work of the page container is that it will only instantiate objects when they are accessed the first time, allowing you to avoid creating all your panes at launch or defining classes that would be wasted with only one instance. I realize that this idea may be a bit abstract right now, so let's look at an example.

Here's the skeleton of a file that will represent the login page for an application...