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On Cappuccino spriting and why it matters, part 1

The first working builds of sprited Cappuccino were released around 14th October.

If you're familiar with Cappuccino this means frameworks that include images/themes and also entire applications can be sprited.
This will be the default behaviour for Cappuccino applications, we'll talk about advantages in a bit, first, a word about spriting if you're wondering what is it.

Developed around mid-1970, spriting is a technique still used today; if you're into CSS you might have used it.
If you're old enough and curious you may have also dug into a videogame's resource files and you may have seen images composed of multiple little images in a grid.

In fact spriting mostly consists in placing images into a larger image grid, and display the image we are requesting by supplying its correct position in the grid.

What that means in Cappuccino?

Simply put, by using spriting, Cappuccino can squeeze all your project's images in a single file, thus reducing the number of requested/served files.

This is a big gainer, since Cappuccino also makes intensive use of themes; Aristo, the now default theme, counts around 111 files.
They will be only 2 after spriting kicks in for all users in master branch.

The wonderful thing is that it's built-in, you are not required to do this kind of stuff. Couple that with the fact that will be using Narwhal-JSC soon, Cappuccino will be *really* fast.

I will discuss with Francisco Tolmasky (tolmasky) of 280 North about how spriting works in Cappuccino and as usual will report my findings here, in a second part of the article.

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