Re: Apple & Cocoa in the Enterprise?
Re: Apple & Cocoa in the Enterprise?
- Subject: Re: Apple & Cocoa in the Enterprise?
- From: Jeff LaMarche <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 12 Jan 2002 09:45:05 -0800
On Friday, January 11, 2002, at 12:58 AM, Reno Marioni wrote:
This question is probably more geared towards someone in Apple (market
development?). It appears from reading this thread that there are some
defficiencies and limitations in Cocoa that are essential requirements
for developing and deploying applications within Enterprise clients.
Cocoa is going to appeal to several types of developers mainly consumer
apps, ISVs, tools and framework developers and inhouse custom
application development. In the old NeXTSTEP days, enterprise clients
like Financial, Intelligence and other enterprise markets bought
OpenStep for its rapidly ability to assemble apps quickly.
Reno
I hope you're able to get some answers to this; a number of us have been
trying without much luck to get Apple to give a clear statement of their
intention with regard to the Enterprise and mid-market. Their actions
indicate that they don't really care that much about re-entering that
market: they EOLed WebObjects Cocoa at 4.5.1, they never brought over
EOF/Cocoa to Rhapsody, and they haven't really been doing much to market
even the one Enterprise app they do seem committed to: WebObjects.
On the other hand, there are some very encouraging signs, as well.
Sybase and Oracle have both announced some support for OS X, with Oracle
it's as a client, but Sybase intends to bring their development tools
over as well. There are also some excellent databases with less name
recognition available for OS X like FrontBase and OpenBase, plus we have
the full suite of open source unix databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL,
although I know MySQL is not up to complex enterprise tasks, and I've
heard that PostgreSQL isn't either, though I've never use it myself.
With Cocoa lacking a coherent (Objective C) Database access solution
akin to EOF for Web (formerly DBKit) or the ability to developed
"distributed" apps akin to Sun's RMI (I have not seen much mention of
PDO or if it is use or Corba IDL ObjC), what are Apple's plans within
the targeting the Enterprise customers. I have not heard or read about
Apple's plans in the Enterprise. (Sun was
workign with NeXT in the early 1990's).
Well, Cocoa does lack an elegant RDBMS access solution, which is
unfortunate because it wouldn't be that much work to move it from
NextStep to Cocoa, but I can't agree with your statement about
distributed apps. DO is in many ways more elegant than Corba and RMI,
but it certainly would be nice to see integration with other
technologies - imagine being able to use DO to talk not only with other
Cocoa apps, but also with other machines on other platforms using other
technologies?
I think with Bud Tribble, who used to work at Sun, will have an
experienced hand at this.
I'm hopeful about Bud Tribble, and am glad he's back regardless of what
he does toward the enterprise market, but I really don't think it's lack
of experience that's the issue. Avie and a number of the OS X engineers
worked at NeXT, and Enterprise was really all that they did. I think
this is coming from on high - probably from Steve himself. They seem to
want to focus on the home market. By making sure that the Macs have
Quicken and Office and that Apple provides a bunch of excellent
consumer-oriented apps for free (iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes), they want to
make what a person uses at work irrelevant to what they choose for home.
Maybe it's a good strategy, but I can't see any harm in trying to
position the platform back into the Enterprise as well, especially given
what an excellent toolset Cocoa is for that environment.
For 3 tier distributed apps, there
appears to be a wall back at the third tier. (I've seen some clever
solutions posted here though)
I don't really have much of a comment here - I'm sure if the need
arises, apps will appear. Writing an app server in Cocoa is not
particularly difficult - in fact, it's downright easy compared to most
development environments.
Anyone from Apple care to comment?
I'll give you 7-2 odds that they don't, although I hope they do.