Are desktop-style web app frameworks like Cappuccino suitable for social websites?

Question

My application started as a desktop app inspired by slow, poorly-designed, overly-complex websites (stuck in pre-2005 era) whose core attraction/feature I took and turned into something leaner, faster and 1000% simpler (while retaining all of the useful featurse).

Now I want to take the idea back to the web, to increase accessibility, ease deployment of updates, reduce piracy, integrate many social features which are a natural fit for the product and most importantly monetize on my product via ads.

I've spent several days researching the available technologies. Seam/Openfaces heavily impressed me, however, i've read bandwidth usage is high as these technologies mostly manage the presentation server-side. Even the ajax-enabled controls are noticeably slower due to most controls not fully leveraging javascript.

I was then heavily impressed by dojo, but the difficulty in theming put me off it within hours of using it. I couldn't even increase the height of an auto-complete search box as the themes images didn't stretch. I didn't see much benefit over jquery if I had to throw away the theme which attracted me in the first place.

I then decided symfony and jquery were decent tools which are pretty flexible and well-supported (and php/symfony a lot cheaper to host than JSF).

I'm now being pestered by the thought of using cappuccino. Not having to think in terms of web pages and page navigation (which symfony doesn't abstract from) is extremely tempting! Each day I see sites like twitter and youtube looking more and more desktop like, so I have no doubt cappuccino's goals aren't popular or future-proof.

However, I feel it may be too desktop-like for a social website. The cocoa UI may be too strong too. We all know people like to categorize things in their mind, and if they see something which says its a social website, but doesn't look, or act in a typical way, like one.. adoption may be made difficult.

What do you guys think?

Answer 1

Cappuccino is much more desktop like than the other choices, like you note. This means there's a bit of loading time and instead of surfing between pages as you normally would in a social networking application you stay in one place.

As a rule of thumb, sites focused on displaying pages to be read aren't great candidates for the 'application' paradigm. HTML was made to present hyperlinked documents for reading, and it'll usually be faster and easier to work with when that's the only thing you're doing.

On the other hand you can certainly take a read heavy site and turn it into an application - e.g. see many Twitter clients.

If you place your site on a scale on which Wikipedia is on the left and a word processor is on the right, your need for Cappuccino is proportional to how far right you are on that scale.

Answer 2

The framework you use shouldn't influence the look of the website. Use whatever you find most comfortable and pick a framework to suite your design, not a design to suite your framework.