What is the difference between Cappuccino and Node.js?

Question

I have been working with node JS for about two weeks and I am liking it a lot. I came cross something called Cappuccino; it sounds like what I want to use to develop a web application. As a beginner, can someone assist with explaining what exactly Cappuccino is and how it fits into node?

Really my hold up with developing an application is that I come from a VB background and I am use to forms to design my desktop apps. I do not want to be limited with a WYSIWYG type of IDE, that is why I started with node.

Answer 1

What sort of web application? There are... many JS libraries/frameworks. It's a jungle.

My strong advice is to build several things, from very small to less small, using pure Javascript. Otherwise you will, I promise, remain forever cloudy on what the language is vs. the frameworks layered on top. JS is very mutable and frameworks have a tendency to create new semantics on top of the core language. The downside of learning by using these is you ever fully understand the complexities and subtleties of the language itself, nor do you ever really understand what those frameworks are giving you (in many cases, things you don't need or that artificially constrain you). Be wary of framework entanglement.

As you get used to writing simple scripts in a text editor (try Sublime Text if you want something much better than that), you'll begin to appreciate when and why you might want help from a framework. Move on to jQuery, as it's the most widely used library and is either a dependency or heavily informs the style of many other libraries out there.

I'm working on a blog post about the topic of frameworks, by no means comprehensive as there are hundreds of them it seems. Specifically, breaking down about 20-30 major players by their intended domain (e.g. DOM manipulation, Single Page Applications, data-binding, MVC, etc.) and strengths and weaknesses.

There are some great books and YouTube videos going into many aspects of modern JS. Anything by Douglas Crockford I recommend (especially book or video "Javascript: The Good Parts". He's pedantic but wise and generally on the money. Then for more inspirational stuff about recent/upcoming changes to the language, watch some stuff from the Google I/O events. Check out HTML5rocks.com for articles on some cutting edge features available in the browser. There are many many more resources, but these are some good ones.

Oh and be sure you are familiar with the dev tools in the browser. I personally recommend Chrome as best of breed. Learn the keyboard shortcut to open it on any page, inspect, and noodle. There are some fancy things such tools support like live editing/saving of source, profiling and debugging, DOM/CSS inspection, and on and on. There are other free and non-free IDEs but IMHO they are too much overhead for someone just learning (and many advanced JS developers use Sublime Text).

P.S.: jQuery, per its design goals, is still going strong but is aimed for obsolescence as browsers increasingly are converging on true standards (ES5, HTML5, CSS3). Even so, for many apps, its shorthand semantics are much better than even the newly supported standards for many things. And it's not going away any time soon, just becoming less important. Like IE. Ignore IE unless you need to build things for work.

Answer 2

As far as I can see, Cappuccino is a client-side framework of some kind, in the same kind of vein as Backbone.js or Angular.js, and is in no way comparable with Node.js. They run in completely different environments (Node on the server, Cappuccino in the browser).

A client-side framework like Cappuccino would be used to implement web apps that needed to do a lot of work on the client side. For instance, if you implemented a real-time web app with Node, you might use it to simplify inserting new content into the DOM.

I haven't used Cappuccino, and it doesn't seem to be all that popular. It seems to be squarely aimed at people with a background in Cocoa development on Mac OS X, so if that's not what you're after I would recommend you look elsewhere. Client-side MVC frameworks are very useful for some use cases, and the big four seem to be Angular.js, Ember.js, Backbone.js and Knockout.js, so I would check out one of them before considering Cappuccino. Knockout is very easy to learn, but lacks routing, which was a deal-breaker for me, so I switched to Backbone. Considering how much mindshare it seems to have, I would probably now go for AngularJS.

Answer 3

Cappuccino is a client side framework built on top of Objective-J which in turn is a complete language built on javascript. It's intended solely for building desktop class applications that happen to run in a browser.

Objective-J adds features to javascript (like classical inheritance) in the same way Objective-C adds them to C. You can use Objective-J with node but probably not most of Cappuccino. Cappuccino is the framework that lets you build rich user interfaces in a way that allows you to completely ignore that you're working with html.

I would not recommend Cappuccino as a first foray into web development unless you really only want to build a business application and you are already a proficient Mac OS X or iPhone developer. It will not help at all to teach you about the web.

Cappuccino is (imho) head and shoulders above everything else in its league, but it is intended (or most useful) for a very tiny niche.

If you're still interested in Cappuccino (or Objective-J) you should really check out the learn section of the Cappuccino project website