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.