So I’ve begun work on a side project I call. (You should try the tutorials yourself!) Prototyping Īs it turns out, Ember.js (née SproutCore 2.0) is shaping up to be a cleanly designed and powerful library with a solid team behind it, and I am enthusiastic about its future.Īnd as Scott has previously blogged, we at Concord would like to create more value for the open source ecosystem. After I finished the first tutorial I had a much better idea of what kind of problems Knockout solves, and how it solves them, than I would have gotten from the usual desultory flip through the Knockout homepage. Without quite intending to, within a few minutes of stumbling onto the tutorials I built and ran working examples that felt like plausible components of a Knockout-powered app, right in the tutorial page itself.
There are only so many hours in a day.īut Knockout.js has a secret weapon: its companion tutorial site,. Since I wasn’t doing this survey “for real”, there was a chance that I would have read through the Knockout documentation in detail, downloaded the library, and made sample pages to play with its features. One of the “maybe” libraries I came across was Steve Sanderson’s impressive Knockout.js. I was looking for a lighter-weight alternative to SproutCore (which we have used for a few projects) while we waited to see what would come of on the greatly slimmed-down, SproutCore-inspired library then that was then supposed to become SproutCore 2.0, and is now a separate project called Ember.js.īut there a lot of “maybe” development tools out there - tools which might be useful someday, but which I don’t need urgently, and which aren’t such breakthroughs that they need to be understood for their own sake. Here at Concord I mostly do client-side web app development, and so recently I found myself surveying the new crop of client-side MVC libraries. In particular, web development itself can benefit. It turns out there are many other domains that can benefit from open-ended tools embedded in structured “learning activities” available via browser. We embed them in documents that introduce topics gently, encourage you to play with the simulation in productive ways, and in general encourage you to think. They approached us because we have spent 10 years writing well-regarded content for Molecular Workbench. Changing the worldīut Google didn’t approach us just because they agree that simulations of molecular behavior are a great way to learn about science. Google seems to agree their philanthropic arm recently gave us a substantial grant to make an HTML5 version of our Molecular Workbench molecular simulation environment. Here at the Concord Consortium we believe that interactive computational simulations are powerful tools for learning about the world in ways that were not previously practical, or even possible. Along the way I was reminded that one of the most useful things about HTML5 is that it helps us to blur the app vs. Summary: I created a prototype of, an interactive tutorial application for web developers who want to learn about Ember.js.