I'm trying to build my first Sproutcore App and I struggle to connect it to a MySQL-Database or any datasource other than fixture. I can't seem to find ANY tutorial except this one from 2009 which is marked as deprecated: http://wiki.sproutcore.com/w/page/12413058/Todos%2007-Hooking%20Up%20to%20the%20Backend . Do people usually not connect SC-Apps to a Database? If they do so, how do they find out how to? Or does the above mentioned tutorial still work? A lot of gem-commands in the introduction seems to already differ from the official Sproutcore getting-started-guide.
SproutCore apps, as client-side "in-browser" apps, cannot connect directly to a MySQL or any other non-browser database. The application itself runs only within the user's browser (it's just HTML, CSS & JavaScript once built and deployed) and typically accesses any external data via XHR requests to an API or APIs. Therefore, you will need to create a service wrapper around your MySQL database in order for your client-side app to be able to load and update data.
There are two things worth mentioning. The first is that since the SproutCore app contains all of your user interface and a great deal of business logic, your API can be quite simple and should only return raw data (such as JSON). The second is that, I should mention that the client-server design, while more tedious to implement, is absolutely necessary in practice, because you can never trust the client side code, which is in the hands of a possibly nefarious user. Therefore, your API should also act as the final gatekeeper to validate all requests from the client.