It’s a visualization of academic citation networks, extending on work he did as an undergraduate at UCSC, for his Masters thesis at Santa Clara University: Demo Movie and Demo App

SproutCore runs in the browser, your production system can use whatever backend you want, as long as it sends JSON to the browser.

When I was using an early version of SproutCore to build .Mac Web Gallery last year, the backing system was a WebDAV server that produced JSON when asked. I’m pretty sure that WebObjects is the backend sending JSON to the calendar and address book applications demoed at last week’s WWDC.

The nice thing about the separation of browser logic from the backend is that you can build some static JSON fixtures you can serve from your local web server while you’re developing your application.

ETA: Charles Jolley reminds me that you can consume XML as well as JSON, but JSON remains faster.

And yes, I know I’m contributing to the proliferation of cat photos on the Web.

One more thing: the Gallery provides feeds in Atom.

8 August 2007 ETA: Charles launched the official SproutCore site this evening. And woah, a link from Daring Fireball can spike one’s traffic, and hopefully create a bunch of users and contributors for the framework.

The obvious desperate web programmer solution is to set up a cron job that drops off a pile of XML and JSON in a cache. But that doesn’t help the 90% of people out there who don’t want to learn the shell, PHP, or JavaScript in order to run their sites.

There’s a wp-cron.php in WordPress 2.1, but there’s no documentation, and no UI for it in the admin screens. I would love to see a control panel for it that allowed you to enter some URLs that you wanted fetched and cached on a regular basis. It could even sanitize the returned data. Then you could use an XMLHTTPRequest wrapper to decorate the page with the cached data. If you were caching HTML fragments, you could set up bindings to named DIVs on the page, and use AHAH.

1. 24 Hours, The Kleptones

   2200 The Underground Hand That Buttoned The Widow was my most played track of 2006, according to iTunes.

2. WriteRoom, Hog Bay Software

   I joined a short story a week writing group in 2006. WriteRoom allowed me to clear my desktop and focus on writing for a couple of hours.

3. Firebug, Joe Hewitt, et al

   I worked on a couple of large JavaScript client applications this year. Firebug made that less insane.

Thanks to everyone behind these, and a happy and prosperous 2007 to you.

But here’s hoping no one takes JSON seriously as a general-purpose data interchange format. We already have one of those. And it’s better. And it has TONS of great tools and ubiquitous platform support built around it.

Too late. According to Mark Nottingham, Robert Cerny’s proposed a schema language for JSON.

eval('(' + request.responseText + ')'); is pretty easy for a VB programmer (or a deadline driven UI programmer like me) to wrap their head around.