Many bloggers have been commenting on one of the more subtle announcements at WWDC: Apple's adoption of SproutCore. I had never heard of this technology before and decided to take a look.
As an embedded/real time programmer, the prospect of web-apps never really excited me. I just did not consider web technologies mature enough to make web-apps a good replacement for native apps. Java tried to make web-apps possible, but in my opinion, failed miserably (in a future posting I'll get into more detail of why I am so hard on Java). Everything else I have tried left me feeling like I was dealing with a patchwork "Frankenstein" rather than a well-crafted native app.
Recently, two technologies have come to my attention which are attempting to make web-apps more native-like: Microsoft's Silverlight, and Adobe's AIR. I took a look at these and found Silverlight to be confusing and not that useful to anyone but die-hard .NET programmers; it is not a platform-independent open standard. I do not like closed standards. Adobe's AIR feels clunky to me and way over-engineered. There is no elegance or craftsmanship to what they pulled together bringing us back to the whole "Frankenstein" feel for an application.
When it was pointed out to me at the WWDC that SproutCore is in competition with Silverlight and Adobe's AIR, I got very interested. What I found was a good evolution to accepted standard technologies done as an open source project. So far, so good. I was impressed with the new MobileMe apps which were demonstrated and someone said they were built with SproutCore. Wow, now I am impressed. These apps have a true native feel and deal with much of the ugliness of pass endeavors (i.e. Java). My thinking on web-apps has changed thanks to SproutCore.
The 3G iPhone may have been the announcement getting all of the attention, but the technology which has the potential of changing the nature of apps, in my opinion, is SproutCore making it the most important of all the announcements.