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!

Alex Iskander is working on Ace 2.0, including some great new support for pluggable renderers.  Theming in SproutCore is about to get awesome.

Read more on Alex’s Blog

Also check out the new Sample Controls

I’m happy to announce that SproutCore 1.0.1046 is the official “1.0” release of SproutCore.  We’ve had the gem out for nearly two months now without any show stopper issues forcing an update, so I’m pretty confident with its stability.

Thanks again to the many people who contributed code to SproutCore 1.0.  You’ve built something you should be very proud of.  

This project was in the works for 18 months.  We rewrote 20,000 lines of code, added nearly 6,000 unit tests, and significantly improved the clarity and consistency of the API.  

Most importantly, SproutCore 1.0 is a performance beast.  It feels really good to be able to recommend SproutCore to people building complex app that will push the boundaries of the browser knowing that we have the goods to get them there.

If you’ve been holding off on SproutCore 1.0 until it was really really done - well it’s ready so come and get it!

Now What?

Ironically, most of the core SproutCore team has moved well along past the 1.0 candidate.  A lot of work is already going into the next release with some really fantastic results.  So must so that I will spend most of my talk at jsconf in April covering the new stuff instead of 1.0.

The good news is that 1.5 (or whatever it’s called) will be a much shorter release cycle - probably starting this summer.  And this time a lot of the development is happening in the community so it is a lot easier for everyone to get involved.  

I’ll save some of the big surprises for jsconf but suffice to say the next few versions of SproutCore will be major moves forward.  1.0 was about laying the ground work for some big things down the road.  These next few releases we start to reap those rewards.

See you at jsconf.

Just in time for SproutCore 1.0, I’m excited to officially announce that SproutCore has a new logo contributed by community member “endash”.  Here’s it is:

Download all the logo variations here

Along with the new logo, we’ve also updated the SproutCore website with a simpler, but I think far more informative version.  Thanks to Tom Dale who put in a few late nights to make this new content happen.  I’m especially excited about the new Getting Started page that takes you through installing and creating a Hello World in just a few easy steps.

Many thanks to endash and Tom who helped to make SproutCore look at good as it works!

In community news, two great new resources have just started up you might want to checkout if you like to follow the latest news on SproutCore.

SproutCore Planet is a blog aggregator that republishes blog posts from SproutCore-focused blogs around the net.

The SproutCore Reddit is another great place to see fresh new links based on community interest.

Thanks to the folks that setup both of these new sites.  I’ll be following both and contributing links to the Reddit site myself.