Wil Shipley: ‘iPhone’S AJAX SDK: No, Thank You’

Wil Shipley:

Us programming in AJAX while Apple programs in real OS X is basically a case of Apple not eating its own dogfood, except that JavaScript isn’t dogfood, it’s dog shit.

Plus, regardless what you think of JavaScript as a language (and Shipley doesn’t think much of it), one enormous difference between Cocoa and AJAX development is that Cocoa has Interface Builder. NeXT programmers have been bragging — rightfully — about using a GUI tool to lay out GUIs for almost 20 years. With AJAX, you’re back to specifying your interface with code.

Shipley makes a great point about this being a tremendous opportunity for Apple, too:

If you look at it from another perspective, this is a “crisortunity” — it’s Apple’s chance to write a new, tighter Cocoa, that has a HUGE built-in market (eg, all iPhone users) to attract developers to it. And, then, eventually Apple could port this back to Macs, and in a few more years it could gently replace the old, kind of bloated Cocoa we have now, as Cocoa is doing with Carbon as we speak.

★ Monday, 9 July 2007