Another week, another geeky new technology to get all excited about.

Leo Laporte was twittering about SproutCore, which caught my interest and led me to a couple of articles. The actual SproutCore website is throwin an error at the moment so I can’t get to the source, but what I’m reading is that SproutCore wants to replace Flash, Adobe AIR and Silverstream as a technology for RIA (rich internet applications).

The beauty of it is that its all written in javascript, so there’s no plug-in to download. Which gets me wondering about SproutCore vs Lively Kernel (another Javascript-based RIA platform in development). Are they in competition or do they compliment one another?

Interesting times. Anyway, here’s a couple of articles worth reading. Thanks to Leo for Twittering about this.

Apple’s open secret: SproutCore is Cocoa for the Web

Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore

If you’re either a new PHP developer, or just new to using PHP Frameworks, the good people at KillerPHP have a great series of screen-cast tutorials to get you started.

Topics include: Setting up Zend Development (Part 1 & Part 2), Zend Controller and Zend View, and Setting Up an MVC Structure with the Zend Framework (Part 1 & Part 2).

I’ve so far watched those last two and they’re very well done. Clear, simple examples that are enough to get you thinking in MVC (Model-View-Controller) terms, at least.

I’ve never used Zend Framework. I have used Code Igniter and was delighted at how fast and easy it made PHP development, once I got my head wrapped around the concept. It looks to me like jumping to Zend would be pretty easy at least conceptually, but I don’t know if there’s any way to shortcut the learning curve of what each framework makes available.

Compare the Zend MVC vids to the Code Igniter video tutorials by Derek Jones and you’ll see what I mean.

Microsoft’s Silverlight has hit their 1.0 RC milestone. In case this one has slipped under your radar, here’s how MS describes the technology:

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

From what I gather, it’s essentially an alternative to Flash. Surprisingly for a product from MS, it’s available for Mac OS X and eventually for Linux as well as Windows.

I’m not going to claim the slightest expertise here. This is a case of a technology floating around and me hearing about it without paying much attention until suddenly it gets in my face. I hope to dig into it a bit more and if/when I do I’ll report my findings.

Warning: Incoming Geek Post

Blueprint is a CSS Framework that’s supposed to help you jump-start the design of a web page. As I’ve spent most of my web development years doing back-end code and not much worrying about display issues, it looks to be a good tool for me to use. Haven’t tried it yet, though.

Darren from gamemakker.co.uk has a post about his initial experiences with Blueprint that is well worth reading.