Is Open Transport Dying?
Is Open Transport Dying?
- Subject: Is Open Transport Dying?
- From: Quinn <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 11:15:37 +0000
At 11:53 +0300 2/2/02, Mike Kluev wrote:
That does mean that OT is dying?
Well, yes and no. For a start, Open Transport will be of serious
concern as long as traditional Mac OS is, which will be for some time
yet. While Apple engineering is now almost entirely focused on Mac
OS X, Apple customers still overwhelmingly use traditional Mac OS.
As long as this continues, Apple's third party developers (you) and
non-engineering Apple folks (like DTS and customer support) will
continue to care about OT. And while we care, Apple engineering
still has to care a little bit (-:
Having said that, there's good reason for you to be working on your
Mac OS X product as a matter of priority. Right now you'll find that
the overwhelming majority of new Mac customers (those buying new
machines today) will be using Mac OS X, simply because it's the
default OS on new systems. New customers are the ones most likely to
buy new software. So, over the next year you'll find that most of
your customers are looking to buy Mac OS X software. If your
products aren't ready, they're going to be unhappy. [Mac OS X users,
and I count myself amongst them, hate Classic, not because it's bad
but for more instinctual reasons.]
However, your developing for Mac OS X product does not make the OT
API obsolete. You must continue to program to the OT API as long as
you want to do networking on traditional Mac OS. My guess is that
this will be for quite some time (years not months).
Ultimately the question of whether OT is dying is one of semantics.
What does "dying" mean to you? What you should be asking is for
concrete advice as to the direction you should take your product.
And here's that advice.
1. If you have a traditional Mac OS version of your product, the OT
compatibility library on Mac OS X is a good way to have the same code
run on both platforms.
2. If you have a Mac OS X-only product derived from a Mac OS 9
product, and you have existing OT code that you ported to Carbon, you
should *not* eliminate it just for the sake of eliminating it. You
might consider making the switch if:
o you have strong evidence that the OT compatibility library is a
performance bottleneck,
o your existing OT code has bugs that are causing your customers
problems,
o you have Windows or UNIX code that you can port over cheaply,
and thus eliminate a big chunk of Mac-specific code from your
cross platform product, or
o your OT code is old and scary and you want to eliminate it as
part of the natural cycle of development.
3. If you're doing new, Mac OS X-only development you should use one
of the non-OT networking APIs (BSD sockets, CF/NSSocket, CFNetwork,
URL Access, CF/NSURLAccess).
I hope that's sufficiently clear. Any questions?
(thus the change of the list name)
Basically, yes. Here's how I explained it when I started the rename process.
At 11:22 +0100 18/9/01, Quinn wrote:
With the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.1, Mac OS X is about to go
mainstream. Now is a good time to think about the future of the
Open Transport Dev mailing list. However, before I outline the
issues, I'd like to thank those who have contributed to this
community by both asking and answering questions. The list has been
running in its current form for over five years, and it's been a
great five years. Thanks everyone!
The issues I see for the list today are:
1. The Name -- "Open Transport Developers" was a good name for
traditional Mac OS as it encompassed both client and kernel
programmers (and outlawed MacTCP and Classic AppleTalk :), however
it's showing its age. If we stick with the name we're going to
either be stuck talking about a Mac OS X compatibility API, or we'll
be covering Mac OS X networking topics on an increasingly misnamed
mailing list.
2. Other Lists -- With the advent of Carbon and Mac OS X, many
networking questions are being asked on other mailing lists
(specifically, <email@hidden> and
<email@hidden>). This is a shame because
folks are missing out on the expertise we've accumulated on this
list. I, for one, just can't keep up with the traffic on either
carbon-dev or darwin-dev.
<tongue position=cheek>
The overriding goal is for me to continue to look relevant to my
management. Being known as "the OT guy" wasn't going my career any
good.
</tongue>
S+E
--
Quinn "The Eskimo!" <
http://www.apple.com/developer/>
Apple Developer Technical Support * Networking, Communications, Hardware