I’ve been telling everyone who would listen over the past view weeks that jsconf is going to be really big for us this year.  We just hit 1.0 and now we’re working on our next big thing.  

Yesterday the Cappuccino team announced their big move to manual memory management.  Some of the Cappuccino core team members even suggested we might want to borrow some of the ideas for SproutCore.

Well, we hear you.  In fact, we’re going to do you one better.  I know I should keep this a secret until jsconf, but:

Starting with SproutCore 1.1, we will be switching to Objective-J.

You read me right.  I’m tired of waiting for ECMAScript 5 and HTML5 to finally become real standards.  It’s time to get some of this crazy stuff now!  

Converting the entire SproutCore API from pure JavaScript to a Objective-J is a big task.  But we have enough done to show you the flavor of some of it.  For example, here is how you might setup a custom view in the future:

Or even better, here is a before and after shot of the toolbar at the top of the SproutCore Todos sample app converted to Objective-J:

Sexy!

Some of you might say you can’t possibly merge two worlds like this.  That trying to adapt SproutCore’s API to something that it wasn’t designed for would make for a horrible experience.

Well I say just look at the results.  It’s almost poetry.

And don’t worry about backwards compatible.  All Sprout-J (working title) code is toll-free bridged so your old stuff will just work.

Of course, there is still a lot of work to do.  But jsconf is still three weeks away and we have a huge army of contractors feverishly working away on this right now to get everything converted in time.

See you at jsconf!