Cocoa for small applications (was: OT: porting PC to Mac - possible market?)
Cocoa for small applications (was: OT: porting PC to Mac - possible market?)
- Subject: Cocoa for small applications (was: OT: porting PC to Mac - possible market?)
- From: Scott Ellsworth <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2005 11:58:44 -0700
On Sep 13, 2005, at 7:41 AM, Luc Vandal wrote:
Is there a market for [PC->Mac] porting?
I suspect that there is such a market, but that you have to decide
three things: your approach, who you are going to market to, and when
you will choose to apply mac-specific technologies, like Cocoa.
We are software consultants - mostly in the life sciences. Primarily
in Java, but also in Cocoa, Ruby, PHP, etc. One of the marketing
messages we use is that an awful lot of scientific software works on
the Mac as well as on the PC, and that the port can be pretty cheap.
A key question, and one that brings this back to cocoa-dev, is where
Cocoa fits in. What technological hurdles get in the way of using
Cocoa as part of a nutritious port effort?
For our customers, they rarely want Cocoa apps up front. They want
their C++, Matlab, or Java apps to work. Once they are working,
however, they often want small front ends, admin apps, or optimized
viewers. Using Cocoa for these tends to work well. We have noted
that senior management tends to use Macs, even in windows-centric
companies. Thus, a one-off cocoa app for the principal investigator
is a possibility, and a service we usually offer at some point.
The biggest lack we have seen in Cocoa is database access. With
NSXMLParser, I have had good luck getting to XML files, but databases
are a royal pain. With Java, we have many good OO database toolkits
- Hibernate, Cayenne, our own homegrown one, and the raw JDBC access
provided at the language layer, and they work like a dream. Since
EOF left, Cocoa lacks this support.
I am very hopeful about Core Data - it has most of what it would
need, so in the Leapord time frame, there is a good chance that I
will be able to get to our MySql and Oracle databases. I can then
continue to use a Java or Ruby based web front end to a scientific
database, and I can provide a small, lightweight Cocoa dedicated
curation app. This would be a very compelling package.
Scott
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