Chris Williams attended RubyFringe in 2008 and was blown away. A small, dedicated conference where the organizers make sure all the small details are tailored towards the audience feels a whole lot different from the mega-events run by agencies that a …

Great notes and great to talk with you at the conference. As a side note, we’ve been discussing the licensing of Axiom Stack internally so keep an eye out for news related to it with the next release of Axiom Stack.

- Nick

Thanks for the great notes about the conference. There seems to be a lot going on in the JavaScript world.

Great write up of the conference, there was so much that went on, I unfortunately didn’t even get to half of what you wrote up during the conference so thank you for recording it! As for a bigger venue, 2010 would be in a different venue space – if we can do it at the same level and quality. Maybe not many more people, but definitely more space. Thank you for the great write up!

For some reason, I was thinking that Objective J supported using the “.” syntax alone for getting and setting values, but it’s entirely likely I’m mistaken. SproutCore’s syntax is absolutely more convenient than what you describe.

As a Python programmer, JS’s lack of true getters and setters is annoying, and I think you’ve done as much as possible to make it convenient.

Thanks for providing the details on SproutCore, and I hope to give the library a whirl sometime soon. It looks like a great piece of work.

In SC you simple write get(‘foo’) and set(‘foo’, ‘bar’). You rarely have to write a getter/setter method yourself. In Cocoa (and in Cappuccino since it is a Cocoa clone) to use KVO you need to use the much more wordy [obj getValueForKey: "foo"] and [obj setValue: "bar" forKey: "foo"] to do the same thing.

Setting up observers is even worse. In SproutCore you just add a property name to your function like so:

fooDidChange: function() {
…
}.observes(“PathTo.Property.toBindTo”)

In Cocoa you do something like:

[PathTo.Property addObserver: someObject forKeyPath: "toBindTo" options: [NSDictionary createWithObjectsAndKeys: "foo", "bar"] context: null]

Also, SproutCore will automatically resolve your binding for you lazily whenever the object you specify is created whereas the above observer method must be called manually by your code only once all the objects involved has been created. It involves usually dozens of lines of code.

Having real getters and setters in JavaScript would be nice, but the SC get()/set() method mean you rarely write your own getter and setter methods at all. In most other languages, including Cocoa, you end up writing accessors for almost all of your properties or you have to use a helper to generate them for you.

Anyway thanks for the review.