[asnyder]

If you're more familiar with things like PHP/Python... etc, something like NOLOH (Not One Line of HTML) http://www.noloh.com might be better. Like Cappuccino, NOLOH allows you to write your application in a single language, instead of Objective-J, the language is PHP. Also, unlike Cappuccino, NOLOH is lightweight and on-demand, this means that it only loads the parts of your application that are currently in use, rather than compiling your entire application in the beginning. However, NOLOH is a server side platform, the opposite of Cappuccino, but this has the benefit of allowing your application to truly be written in a single language, rather than having to write parts of your application in Cappuccino, and other parts in your server language. I recommend watching the Hello World video in the features section of the NOLOH website to see what I mean.

[tlrobinson]

"However, NOLOH is a server side platform, the opposite of Cappuccino, but this has the benefit of allowing your application to truly be written in a single language, rather than having to write parts of your application in Cappuccino, and other parts in your server language."

That argument doesn't really make sense, since you can run JavaScript / Objective-J on both the client and the server, but you can only run PHP on the server (though from what I understand you translate PHP to JavaScript?)

Objective-J runs on a number of JavaScript engines that can run on the server, including Rhino (check out the "objj" executable in the "Tools" package: http://cappuccino.org/download/). While we don't have a good web server solution yet, it's certainly a possibility.

But even once that is a reality, Cappuccino will be totally server agnostic, so it will work with whatever server side technology you are comfortable with (or stuck with)

[asnyder]

NOLOH does not translate PHP to JavaScript, certain aspects of NOLOH use JavaScript, but no translation takes place. The 1.8 release of NOLOH will allow for your applications to run with or without JavaScript enabled.

The fundamental difference between Cappuccino and NOLOH is that unlike Cappuccino, GWT, Silverlight, Java, Flash, etc, a NOLOH application is not a compiled application living on your local machine, which means you don't download the entire application, rather it's lightweight and on-demand. Because of this you can write things such as Amazon.com in NOLOH, as well as things like 280Slides, all while having a smaller footprint, but maintaining a unified application lifecycle. This also has other benefits such as being able to modify your application while it's running, as seen in the Hello World video. See http://www.noloh.com/#/section=features for more information.

There will be Python and Ruby versions of NOLOH in the near future.

I recommend you play around with NOLOH a bit more before making these statements. Please note that I wasn't belittling Cappucinno in any way, I was suggesting that if he was more comfortable with things like PHP, Python, etc, that NOLOH might be a better fit for him, rather than having the equivalent of a thick client application.