Where to start learning Cocoa and Cappuccino?

I don’t think I’m alone in the fact that over the past twelve months I have been learning Cocoa specifically Cocoa Touch for the iPhone. Apps and tutorials will follow! However I have also been looking at Cappuccino (http://cappuccino.org/) a direct port of Cocoa to JavaScript. The intention of Cocoa and Cappuccino is to make the development of applications a quick, simple and fun exercise, however if like me you are approaching this from a web development standpoint those first steps can be a little hard.

However I have found a set of resources that will be invaluable if you too are trying to get to grips with Cocoa or Cappuccino.

Cocoa & Objective-C

Cocoa is an Object Orientated MVC framework build in Objective-C a superset of C. It is the framework used to develop the native applications for Mac and the iPhone. It is a well proven framework created and supported by Apple with a vast developer community.

Cappuccino & Objective-J

Cappuccino is and Object Orientated MVC framework built in Objective-J a superset of JavaScript. It is a direct port of Cocoa by the guys behind (http://www.280north.com/). It runs directly in any JavaScript enabled web browser. Cappuccino has been used in a number of applications such as:

• http://280slides.com/
• http://almost.at/

Where do you start?

Cocoa has vast amounts of very very high quality documentation on the Apple site (http://developer.apple.com/) however it is not the most accessible read. It is amazing once you have made those first steps but there are not many step by step tutorials or lesson based examples. However after a lot of searching and reading I have found some great starting points:

• http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2007/09/09/getting-started-with-cocoa-a-friendlier-approach/
• http://cocoadevcentral.com/
• http://www.teachmecocoa.com/

Cappuccino when compared to Cocoa is in it’s infancy. As such the documentation is not as complete, however you can transfer a lot of knowledge from the Cocoa documentation. Again here is a list of the resources I have found when learning Cappuccino:

• http://www.littletreesoftware.com/blog/
• http://cappuccino.org/learn/tutorials/
• http://cappuccino.org/learn/documentation/

Conclusion

These frameworks can be very daunting at first and the syntax alien but after I while using them they can be a very intuitive and expressive languages. The Cocoa community is very large with a wealth of knowledge however it appears that not may developers pass on the experiences online so it can be very hard to find good examples online. Cappuccino opens the door for existing Cocoa developers to move to building for the web. This hopefully will lead to much more content being made available for people new to the language.

I have found the learning Cappuccino and Cocoa together very helpful and the examples I have found transfer very well. I look forward to seeing the rich web applications that will come out of the meeting of these two communities and technologies.

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