Starting up SproutCore Chicago

Although SproutCore has been around for several years, and we've been using it for projects for a year and a half, it hasn't achieved as much uptake or visibility as one might expect given its age. And while the community is generally helpful, it is fairly small and exists only in IRC and Google Groups (unless you're lucky enough to live in California).

At the beginning of the year we started a new project with SproutCore, and decided to see what we could do to help grow the community. We've now hosted two SproutCore Meetups in Chicago, and are looking forward to hosting more in the future.

Our first event was in March, and there were about 20 people in attendance. We're trying to have two presentations at each meetup, and at this one I talked about what was new in SproutCore 1.5 and Jeff O'Dell talked about using Lewbowski to test SproutCore applications.

Two weeks ago we had a second Meetup, and it also went well. Corey Burrows (one of our lead developers)  gave a really great talk on statecharts, the problems they solve, and how to use them in SproutCore applications. Then Tom Dale from Strobe gave a remote presentation on The Future of SprouteCore, where he announced the SproutCore 2.0 Developer Preview. As far as I know, we were the first people to learn of the release outside of Strobe.

I've been pleasantly surprised by the response to these events, and we're looking forward to hosting more! If you're in Chicago, join the group at Meetup and we'll let you know when the next event is happening.