Re: Marketing WO
Re: Marketing WO
- Subject: Re: Marketing WO
- From: "Clive Roberts" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2006 22:33:12 +0100
here, here
Click on the Apple website on "Store", ".Mac" and "Music Store" and they all
run on WebObjects - ie all the online services. Not going away and quite a
good advert for the technology!
Clive
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Hill" <email@hidden>
To: "Ken Anderson" <email@hidden>
Cc: "WebObjects Dev Apple" <email@hidden>
Sent: Sunday, August 13, 2006 9:57 PM
Subject: Re: Marketing WO
> WO is alive and vibrant and we just lost the anchor of Xcode and
> platform confusion! I just did a quick search on SourceForge for
> WebObjects. 27 projects. I was surprised.
>
> Chuck
>
> P.S. One final thought. Given that Apple is deprecating the tools,
> anyone want to guess how many WO developers at Apple use Xcode for
> WebObjects? ;-)
>
>
>
> On Aug 13, 2006, at 1:48 PM, Ken Anderson wrote:
>
> > Same here.
> >
> > The one thing I think is very important is to take a page from the
> > Republican playbook. Stop saying "WO isn't dead". I would like to
> > have a funeral for that phrase, because the more people say it, the
> > more people ask the question - "Is WO dead?".
> >
> > What say you! ?
> >
> > Ken
> >
> > On Aug 13, 2006, at 4:38 PM, Chuck Hill wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I have been trying to keep my mouth shut on this, not something
> >> that I am good at. :-) Pierce said so many smart things that I
> >> feel compelled to ride on hit coattails and chime in a bit.
> >>
> >>
> >> On Aug 13, 2006, at 11:07 AM, Pierce T. Wetter III wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I challenge the fundamental premise of this thread.
> >>>
> >>> Bottom Line:
> >>>
> >>> The collection of people who know/love WebObjects need to start
> >>> thinking of themselves as "The WebObjects Community" and start
> >>> thinking of Apple as "one of the major contributors to WebObjects".
> >>>
> >>> That is, even without any NDA info, I can easily point out from
> >>> what Apple has
> >>> said long ago in public that they consider WebObjects more of a
> >>> technology then a product. That happened when they made it free
> >>> on MacOSX.
> >>>
> >>> Yet these days, a thriving internet technology needs a thriving
> >>> community. We need to stop expecting Apple to lead WebObjects
> >>> somewhere.
> >>
> >> Yes. Yes. Yes. We need to stop moaning, "Somebody needs to do
> >> something!". And that means YOU not some other anonymous reader
> >> of this list. A lot of us have already done a lot of work with
> >> blogs, pod casts, videos, Open Source contributions, books,
> >> training etc. It is time to put up or shut up.
> >>
> >>
> >>> Apple uses WO in house to a huge extent. They are going to
> >>> continue to maintain and enhance WO. So its not, and never will
> >>> be "dead", despite the rumors every year.
> >>
> >> Right. WO is not dead and is not going to be dead. The question
> >> is not "Is WO dead?" but "What are we as the community going to
> >> do, whine or make the things we say that we need?" Apple does not
> >> need them so it is not going to make them.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> But at this point the community has surpassed Apple. It wasn't
> >>> Apple who worked so hard to get WOLips working, write an EOModel
> >>> editor from scratch, or write a Rules editor they now consider
> >>> superior to their own. Every day there is more open source code
> >>> in "WebObjects" as used by most WO developers. At some point, the
> >>> community will have contributed more source to WO then Apple has.
> >>> [if they haven't already, I haven't compared the source output
> >>> from the jad decompiler to Wonder lately.]
> >>>
> >>> "Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way".
> >>
> >> Amen. Absolutely need a WYSIWYG editor? Make one! Don't whine
> >> about how what others have made for their needs does not fit your
> >> needs. They don't have any obligation to make one for you and
> >> probably no interest, otherwise they would have already done it.
> >> We are all developers, if the need is great we can do it. We all
> >> know how it goes: define the requirements, decide on architecture,
> >> generate the specifications, write the documentation and test
> >> plan, develop the code, test it, and release. It is what we do
> >> every day. We need to get organized.
> >>
> >>
> >>> Apple hasn't really been leading WO since about 5.0. They
> >>> haven't been following the community either, because there's been
> >>> no community. (In fact, its only the last year or so that WO
> >>> programmers have started thinking of themselves as a community.)
> >>> I can't tell you what Apple said at WWDC, but I can tell you my
> >>> take: Apple is getting out of the way.
> >>
> >> And while you really can't tell it from the recent messages on the
> >> list, the community did really gel at WWDC. I was very positive
> >> on Friday. Now, reading all this on the list, I am feeling much
> >> less so.
> >>
> >>
> >>> It's up to us to rise to the challenge.
> >>>
> >>> Recently, as part of my job search, I was talking to the
> >>> President of a firm that employs about 20 WO programmers. He told
> >>> me that he was worried about the future of WO, so he was trying
> >>> to port some of his stuff to Hibernate/Struts.
> >>>
> >>> It was impossible (a hello world app requires 200 lines of XML
> >>> code first...), so now he's shopping for a J2EE technology that
> >>> is as capable as WO. He hasn't found one.
> >>
> >> And, as most of us know, he isn't going to find one.
> >>
> >>
> >>> There are quite a few WO shops out there who have built up
> >>> their own in-house libraries. That's one of the key competitive
> >>> advantages of WO: the more work you do, the more you can get done.
> >>>
> >>> Perhaps those houses need to stop thinking of the other WO
> >>> consultants as your competition and start thinking of them as
> >>> your allies. You need to start contributing to Wonder, so that
> >>> you and your allies get web applications jobs rather then the
> >>> hordes of nameless idiot J2EE developers.
> >>
> >>> That is, the stronger the WO community as a whole becomes, the
> >>> richer everyone in the WO community gets. So if you work at as WO
> >>> consulting firm, have you thought about open-sourcing your
> >>> internal frameworks? Would you rather make $150/hour doing WO or
> >>> $75/hour editing XML files in Hibernate? When you keep your
> >>> internal frameworks proprietary, that's the choice you're making.
> >>
> >> And GVC has done just this. The frameworks that we once
> >> considered (correctly too I might add) our competitive advantage
> >> are now Open Source (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gvcsitemaker
> >> in case you missed it). We are updating these and will
> >> periodically post new versions. Anything we develop in the future
> >> will be Open Sourced as well. Take a look at the reusable code
> >> you have laying around (and not reusable stuff as examples too).
> >> Can it be Open Sourced?
> >>
> >>
> >>> Which brings us to the premise of the thread.
> >>>
> >>> We're WO developers, not marketeers. We don't need to market
> >>> WO, we need to contribute our code to the community. With a
> >>> thriving community comes interest, O'Reilly books, and magazine
> >>> articles. WO is a development system, not a new car, having an ad
> >>> won't get people interested.
> >>
> >> Yep, ever seen an ad for Ruby on Rails?
> >>
> >>> If we do that, I think we'll find that more and more of what
> >>> Apple does with WO gets open sourced. They already contribute to
> >>> Wonder. When the community reaches the point that the closed
> >>> source portion of WO is only 25% of the total, I think that either:
> >>>
> >>> 1. We won't need Apple anymore at all and someone may dig in
> >>> and replace everything.
> >>> 2. Apple will open source the rest.
> >>>
> >>> So we need not market WebObjects. Market yourself as a web
> >>> application developer, and realize that one of the best ways to
> >>> market yourself as an app developer is to contribute to the
> >>> community. When I was an independent consultant, every time I
> >>> contributed back to the community, I was able to bill at a higher
> >>> rate, because people/firms who contribute to the community end up
> >>> being recognized as experts by that community. I reaped far more
> >>> then I sowed.
> >>
> >> One other thing we can do to help ourselves is to generate
> >> awareness of WebObjects locally. Is there a Java user group in
> >> your area? Give a presentation on WebObjects. "Java Runs Ruby
> >> Off the Rails" ought to get quite an audience. The more technical
> >> people that know about WO, the more people will want it. That
> >> means more business for us and a larger community.
> >>
> >>
> >>> None of this required any NDA knowledge (I had these thoughts
> >>> before the show.) so you non-WWDC attendees can feel free to
> >>> chime in before whatever public announcements come.
> >>>
> >>> One non-Apple thing I took away from the show: There are
> >>> actually more WO programmers then there have been in the past
> >>> (post-bubble was especially bad), and that we all have started to
> >>> think of ourselves as a community.
> >>>
> >>> _Apple_ may only be making a few _billion_ a year on WO (if you
> >>> count the iTunes Music Store), but there are quite a few of us
> >>> making money on WO beyond that. So the community isn't going to
> >>> go away and WebObjects isn't going to go away. So enough FUD!
> >>>
> >>> Instead, lets make the community so strong, that in two years,
> >>> Apple is proposing to US what it would like to see in WO, and
> >>> we're considering it...
> >>
> >> Now THAT I would like to see!
> >>
> >> Chuck
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Coming sometime... - an introduction to web applications using
> >> WebObjects and Xcode http://www.global-village.net/wointro
> >>
> >> Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their
> >> overall knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve
> >> specific problems. http://www.global-village.net/products/
> >> practical_webobjects
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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>
> --
> Coming sometime... - an introduction to web applications using
> WebObjects and Xcode http://www.global-village.net/wointro
>
> Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their
> overall knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve specific
> problems. http://www.global-village.net/products/practical_webobjects
>
>
>
>
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