Re: EOF - was (Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa) )
Re: EOF - was (Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa) )
- Subject: Re: EOF - was (Cocoa Books (was New to Cocoa) )
- From: "William Moss" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2002 11:47:00 -0400
Kevin Callahan - email@hidden writes:
>
Is there really no chance in hell
>
that Apple will bring EOF/ObjC back
>
to the platform?
I don't think anyone outside of Apple, and maybe outside of Steve Jobs can
answer this. I'm not certain that the real reasons for canning the EOF were
made public.
Maybe it was for technical reasons. Another technology that seems to be
getting downplayed is NetInfo. A great idea ten years ago when nothing else
was a standard, but never fully developed and perhaps too hard to maintain.
Now that LDAP has arrived, I wouldn't ever expect to see things still
broken with NetInfo (like shadowed password features) to be fixed. Perhaps
taking EOF out of wide developer circulation was Apple's way of weening
developers away from the technology.
Maybe it was for political reasons. Perhaps with Larry Ellison's influence
on Steve convinced him that database vendors weren't going to bring their
databases to Mac OS X if there was a standard technology that allowed
developers to flit between one database and another going and turning db
products into a commodity.
Maybe it was for economic reasons: Maybe Apple thought that rolling its own
technology to do what EOF does was a bad idea if they could leverage off of
other technologies like JDBC and ODBC standards rather than forcing yet
another Apple-proprietary standard onto the market. Many commercial
databases didn't write EOF adapters and probably wouldn't willingly do so
without a big monetary payment from Apple. Perhaps Apple added up all the
dollar signs that it would take to make EOF a success and just decided it
wasn't worth it.
Of course none of these arguments really make sense once you realize that
WebObjects still uses EOF. To me that fact alone says that there's more
going on here than will ever be publicly known. (A secret part of the
Apple/Microsoft deal? A marketing dictate because EOF sounded too
technical? A unfavorable tarot card reading?)
I'd very much like to see EOF return. My work would be much easier with a
technology well integrated into Cocoa that does what EOF does. But it's
foolish for me to wait on it or hope for it. If you want to see EOF (or
something with EOF functionality) return to Cocoa, write Apple and tell
them. But I wouldn't make any plans for a particular timeframe that it
might reappear.
William
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