SproutCore; open source meets Apple and web apps

When Apple assimilates... er... I mean hires developers, you often wonder what will come of it. Will a shinning star be snuffed out, buried, forgotten or stymied? Or will great things happen, pushing the envelope that contains the Apple-sphere, making the hardware giant showcase a new facet of the... erm... once narrow minded, acutely focussed business model.

One could wonder such things when Apple hired Charles Jolley, Sproutit founder and Mailroom developer, to re-architect their .Mac side of things. We have seen new things pop up in .Mac that were surely the influence of a Charles Jolley way of thinking; the photo gallery and what-not. And then comes MobileMe, a very rich internet application that defies all that we have known about web apps; they don't have to suck. Surely this is the work of Charles Jolley. So what is to become of this seemingly fresh way of doing RIA's?

That's when Apple (and a few friends) drop SproutCore on us, an open standard platform for building web apps that look and feel like desktop apps... seriously... they do. But let me restate the cool part, open standard platform. That's right, this is not Flash or SilverLight or even Java, this is open web standards such as HTML, CSS and Javascript with a bit of Cocoa inspiration.

Finally a javascript framework that I can get behind and one that I can sit down and take a crack at, knowing that a) it's open and b) it has the support of a few heavy hitters behind it.