Back in June, the developers of 280 North released their first web app, called 280 Slides. The Keynote-esque presentation software works so much like a desktop app, it's sometimes hard to believe it runs in a browser. But 280 North used an interesting way to build the app: instead of making HTML, CSS, and JavaScript try to work like an app framework, they instead ported a desktop app framework—Cocoa—to JavaScript.

The result of their work is Cappuccino, a port of Cocoa to run under Objective-J; essentially, it's an Objective-C-like JavaScript runtime. As promised in June, both have now been released as open-source software under the LGPL. Now, anyone with Cocoa programming experience can transfer a good chunk of their knowledge to create rich, desktop-like apps that run right in the browser. Those with JavaScript experience should also be able to use Cappuccino without much difficulty, since Objective-J is a strict superset of JavaScript.

While 280 North's approach to web app development is unique, Cappuccino's web site has extensive documentation, tutorials, and links to plenty of resources to get you started. And like I said before, if 280 Slides is any indication of what's in store for Cappuccino-based apps, I'm looking forward to doing more and more via the browser.