I just read on Ajaxian that the Cappuccino team announced Atlas, a new “visual layout editor and development environment”, today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. I heard Atlas mentioned (not by name) by a member of the Cappuccino team, Ross Boucher while attending a Cappuccino bootcamp session at Web Directions North a couple of weeks ago. That said, after the brief description I still wasn’t quite sure what to expect.
Now that I’ve seen it in action, I must say that it looks pretty impressive. When Ross mentioned they were building Atlas, I expected that they were working on a GUI builder like the Ext GUI builder that has been around for awhile now. Atlas, however, is more than just a layout editor.
Using Atlas, you can build layouts and interfaces (there are a bunch of fancy widgets available that you can drag-and-drop onto the layout) and easily connect components. They even have some ready-built “connections” to allow developers to easily bring external content (RSS, Twitter, etc.) into the app.
Atlas won’t be ready for use until sometime this Summer, but you can check out a short screencast showcasing some of the functionality at the Atlas site.
I have been playing around a bit with Cappuccino over the last couple of weeks, and may be able to get a couple of example mapping apps built on Cappuccino up here soon.
The visual nature of Atlas reminds me of the “Ext Designer” tool that Jack Slocum previewed a couple of months ago. It is good to see these types of tools coming out, as they can only make things easier for developers. I do hope, though, that things don’t become too easy, as I could see a new programmer coming in and never wanting to get their hands dirty. That said, having visual design tools available does take down one more barrier, making frameworks like Cappuccino more accessible to those who may otherwise not be interested.