The purpose of this book is twofold. The first is to teach you everything you need to know about the application development framework, SproutCore. As the first official SproutCore book, written by the head of the project, this book is the most in-depth and complete introduction to the framework anywhere in existence. In this book we will comprehensively look at every component of SproutCore, including the runtime environment, the powerful model, view and controller layers, the less familiar, but equally important application state, data interface layers, and many other supporting technologies that are built into SproutCore. We also go through hundreds of examples, hints, and tips to get you comfortable and productive with SproutCore as quickly as possible.
The second purpose is to enable you to build and deploy professional quality web applications as quickly as possible. As you will find, SproutCore's features can be described in terms of how that particular feature improved the process of real-world software development and web app deployment. As you read through the book, you will be introduced to the components of SproutCore along with the reasoning behind each and the manner in which you can use each for your real-world projects.
SproutCore is the result of developing several of the most advanced and ambitious web applications that have ever existed and so connecting you with that experience gained is a key purpose of this book.
Chapter 1, Introducing SproutCore, introduces the framework, covers how and when to use it, and works through a tutorial of a fully functioning SproutCore application.
Chapter 2, The Runtime Environment, covers the core technologies that we will use and build upon in all SproutCore applications.
Chapter 3, The View Layer, covers the structure of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm in SproutCore along with the view layer specifically.
Chapter 4, The Model Layer, covers the model and data interface layers for synchronizing and managing client-side and server-side data.
Chapter 5, The Controller Layer, covers the Controller and Application State layers for controlling and connecting all the parts together into a cohesive application.
Chapter 6, Testing, Building, and Deploying, completes the entire software development process in order to test, build, and ultimately deploy a real application.
To follow along with the tutorial in this book, you will need to install the SproutCore framework and build tools. The framework and tools are available for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux and the instructions are included in Chapter 1, Introducing SproutCore. Further instructions may be found at http://sproutcore.com.
This book is intended for software developers who are already doing web app development and are looking to tackle more ambitious projects akin to Apple's iCloud web apps or non-web software developers who are looking to move into web application development and still apply their skills and knowledge within a software developer oriented web framework.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: " The first function, module(), is used for starting a new group of tests."
A block of code is set as follows:
config :my_app, :required => [ :'sproutcore/desktop', :'sproutcore/datastore', :'sproutcore/statechart' ]
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
// Resume the previous match.
resumeMatch: function () {
this.gotoHistoryState('matchState');
}
}),Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ mkdir frameworks $ cd frameworks $ mkdir my_framework
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Right now, we're only going to focus on tests within the Apps section, where we see our Contacts app is listed".
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