I don’t know about you, but I sure miss seeing new versions of Actiontastic showing up on this blog every few weeks. If I had to guess, I would even say frequent releases were more exciting than my occasional dives into CloudKit and the vision for cross-platform synchronized data using only web technologies.

This isn’t to say that the work on CloudKit is unimportant but only to say that delivering working software has more immediate benefits to readers of this blog than status updates on a project that probably seems invisible to people who don’t follow me on GitHub. Further, the JavaScript portion of CloudKit is holding up several other exciting projects. So here’s what I’m going to do…

Actionatr Absorbs Open Source Actiontastic

Open source Actiontastic and Actionatr are the same thing, so from now on I will refer to the open source Actiontastic as Actionatr, because that’s exactly what it is. CloudKit is still its foundation. It is still being actively developed and already has some really cool features as a platform.

For example, a one-liner will generate a data model that has routes on it plus a matching JavaScript version that runs in a browser or inside Adobe AIR. (When Mozilla Prism gains HTML5 client database storage, things might change.) Another one-liner will publish an upgrade to all desktop clients and migrate data models to match the server models. This includes the offline SQLite models for AIR. It also has the beginnings of AMQP support so that RabbitMQ can push realtime updates to the browser.

None of this is going away. I have, however, realized that the project has such a large scope that Actiontastic 1.0 shouldn’t have to wait on it.

Actiontastic 1.0

Actiontastic 1.0 will still sync across desktop clients as planned, but it will not have a Windows or Linux version. Those will show up when Actionatr arrives. This will allow me to focus on the data/sync part of CloudKit minus the JavaScript/SSB part of it and execute more quickly. It is sort of a Pragmatic CloudKit that includes web tech on the server and Cocoa on the desktop. “Purist CloudKit” will not use Cocoa.