From AppleInsider:

As Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight duke it out over their plugin-based, HTML-alternative web platforms, Apple is using Gianduia, its new a client-side, standards based framework for Rich Internet Apps, to create production quality online apps for its retail users.

Apple introduced Gianduia last summer at WOWODC (World of WebObjects Developer Conference), an independent event scheduled near the company's own WWDC event in June. It is likely that more information will surface at this year's WOWODC and WWDC events.

Gianduia, named after an Italian hazelnut chocolate, is "essentially is browser-side Cocoa (including CoreData) + WebObjects, written in JavaScript by non-js-haters," according to a tweet by developer Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch. "Jaw dropped."

After watching the NDA demo Apple gave for the new framework at WOWODC last year, Rentzch also tweeted, "Blown away by Gianduia. Cappuccino, SproutCore and JavascriptMVC have serious competition. Serious."

Sounds very interesting. Having done quite a bit of work in the area of connecting web clients (heavily enriched by javascript) to backend systems lately, this holds a lot of interest for me.