Mulberry: News from the Alpha

It’s been about six weeks since we announced our plans to release Mulberry, a set of application development tools we’ve been working on for more than a year. A lot has happened in those six weeks: we transformed tens of thousands of lines of code into something we were ready for the world to see, arrived at a very permissive license for the code, and started sharing Mulberry with a handful of developers to get their feedback ahead of an official release.

That developer feedback has been fascinating. We’ve talked to developers who are using Mulberry as a shortcut to get their own startup off the ground, and developers who have caught on quickly to the potential to easily create a host of similar apps using Mulberry as the foundation. We’ve had developers identify and fix bugs we never knew we had, and we’ve even had developers make serious strides toward getting Mulberry — which was developed entirely on MacOS X — running on Windows.

The most interesting thing, though, has been seeing how developers are using Mulberry in ways we never imagined. Mulberry was originally written to create a certain kind of app: a rich, absorbing experience, but one that’s mostly built using static content. Our alpha testers are crafty folks, though, and they didn’t hesitate to ask us how to get Mulberry to do things it wasn’t built to do. They were seeking dynamic, data-driven experiences that were a far cry from traditional Mulberry apps.

Time and again, it was a matter of just a few lines of code to show them how Mulberry could meet their needs, and this proved one of our key hypotheses: Mulberry gives developers patterns and tools that they can adapt to meet a wide variety of needs, without ever worrying about the underlying plumbing that’s required to create a complex JavaScript application that will work across devices. This means that developers can focus their efforts on the parts of an application that are truly unique, and that could have a big impact on the time — and skills — required to get an app to market.

Exciting things will be happening in the coming days, weeks, and months. To kick things off, Mulberry version 0.1 will make a quiet, public appearance on GitHub any day now — you’ll want to sign up for the mailing list at mulberry.toura.com and follow @touradev on Twitter to be among the first to know. Once the code is in the wild, we’ll be hard at work figuring out how to continue to help developers make the most of it. We’re looking forward to it!