If you want just want to give Blossom a spin, please try the demo.
NEW! Blossom 1.0.0-beta.1 was released on March 1, 2012. Here's the announcement and the release notes:
Blossom's API and feature set are now stable enough to begin developing production applications with, and Blossom includes the latest Statechart and Datastore code from SproutCore 1.8.
This is an early beta for experienced SproutCore developers targeting the latest releases of the Google Chrome and Apple Safari desktop web browsers. The public API is 99.9% stable (the only breaking changes going forward will be to accommodate bug fixes).
Only Blossom's application framework differs from SproutCore in terms of the public API (the foundation and datastore frameworks remain unchanged), so the vast majority of your existing knowledge re: how to write SproutCore apps still applies.
Note: Print-to-PDF support is missing, although Blossom's drawing model does support it correctly, so any SC.View and/or SC.Layer drawing code you write today will be supported when Print-to-PDF is enabled in a future release.
Blossom extends the reach of traditional SproutCore applications beyond the web browser by re-architecting the view layer to be HTML and CSS-independent.
Blossom also extends the kinds of apps that can be written in JavaScript by implementing an easy-to-use, high-performance animation subsystem that leverages hardware acceleration on the GPU whenever possible. The API is roughly based on Apple's Core Animation framework, and provides similar capabilities -- even in modern web browsers.
Since SproutCore's HTML and CSS dependencies were removed, Blossom can support native runtimes on the desktop (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) and on mobile devices (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone) and tablets (iOS, Android) -- and that's in addition to modern web browsers, all with the same API.
Blossom's native runtimes are not "WebView" wrappers like PhoneGap or Cappuccino's poorly named "NativeHost". A "WebView" wrapper simulates a web browser inside of a native, double-clickable app, so the performance is just as poor on mobile devices and tablets as a web app running in a mobile browser is today. (In many cases, it's substantially worse.)
Blossom is different: instead of simulating a web browser, Blossom's native runtime has high-performance, platform-native implementations of the various Blossom and SproutCore classes, such as SC.Request (for networking), SC.Layer (for animation), as well as the various JavaScript runtime objects such as CanvasRenderingContext2D, Float32Array and ArrayBuffer that are exposed to Blossom developers. This is similar to Node.js, another JavaScript runtime based around Google v8 that also does not support HTML or CSS.
One of Blossom's key innovations is its drawing model, which is modeled after Mac OS X's "Quartz 2D" API. This PDF-compatible drawing model is used for all of Blossom's native views. Most importantly, drawing is GPU-accelerated even on mobile devices, and views draw identically on every host, including modern web browsers. This feature alone eliminates one of SproutCore's long-standing problem areas: quickly creating custom views that render fast.
Blossom is a modern application framework especially well-suited to apps running full screen on tablets and mobile devices, with rich animation and effects. In addition, modern operating systems including Mac OS X 10.7 and Windows 8 have moved strongly towards full-screen, single-window, immersive applications with heavy use of animation. This app model is also compatible with Blossom's capabilities when running in a modern web browser, making a Blossom app feel at home in all of these environments.
Blossom's developer tools run on Node.js, and Blossom is licensed under the GPLv3 for non-commercial use; commercial licenses will be available soon from Fohr under terms similar to what Sencha offers for Ext.js.
- Why Blossom exists: http://bit.ly/future-of-sproutcore
- IRC Channel: #blossom on irc.freenode.net
- Want to give Blossom a spin? https://github.com/fohr/blossom-testproject
- Demo: http://fohr.github.com/blossom
- Questions? Use stackoverflow.com and the blossom tag.
Watch this repository on GitHub to follow development, or fork it and submit a pull request to help contribute to it's evolution.
Blossom was conceived and written by Erich Ocean at Fohr eocean@fohr.com, and is based on the SproutCore version 1.4.5 release.