Built with … Cappuccino

What is Cappuccino?

It’s not about coffee here. Rather, Cappuccino is an open source application framework, available at github, a solid foundation, allowing to to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser, only relying on HTML5 and JavaScript. This is accomplished in two ways: (1) by “Objective-J” (a superset of JavaScript), a language very similar to Objective-C, and (2) by re-implementing a sizeable part of Apple’s NS* and CG* frameworks.

I liked Objective-C anyway, so using Objective-J was no big problem, and the NS* and CG* frameworks allow for a rich user interface with a consistent and fluent look-and-feel. If you have experience developing for Macintosh or iOS, you are nearly there.

Some of the things I like

• Functions have named parameters (inherited from Objective-C). Thus the code can be made nearly self-documenting.
• The GUI can be set up in Xcode’s Interface Builder. This allows fully interactive graphical web design, two-way dynamic bindings are set up in the interface and obviate the pain in keeping the GUI updated.
• HTML & DOM is fully abstracted away – but still can be directly accessed where necessary
• JavaScript can be freely intermixed with Objective-J. Allowed JavaScript syntax has recently been modernised. So for local/temporary variables I use const/let, to iterate for (let x of <array>)…, and await with friends.

Note on Web security and same-origin policy

All browsers now have implemented the “same-origin policy” (Wikipedia). If you want to run the Cappuccino demos from disk, you need to “allow cross origin requests”, which can be enabled in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, … (web search for your preferred browser). Or set up a local web server, which is rather easy nowadays.

Where can I learn more?

Cappuccino is a major open-source endeavour which relies on a wonderful & select group of developers. Learning it requires a sizeable effort, yet is highly rewarding. I thank that community for creating and continuing development of this marvelous tool:

• cappuccino.dev
• New Node version – that’s what I’ve switched to 2022-05, and that will be going forward
• Check out a live demo of the huge number user interface elements in Cappuccino
• Tutorials for the above
• Cappuccino Blog
• My paper discussing web-based animation techniques + a bit on Cappuccino [PDF]
• Cappuccino for Beginners ←very good intro which I found a little late
• Introduction to Objective-J and Cappuccino with Tom Robinson brief on major concepts of Objective-J

Where is Cappuccino used on this site?

In 2011 I had started to list them, but at 100 this seemed a moot effort; the short answer is: for nearly each of my 150+ visual phenomena. Also my vision test FrACT₁₀, a very sizable application, is built upon it.