| (I knew it was only a matter of time before white space between words was replaced by capitalization, like Microsoft's ugly underlines in Windows seems to have made their way into the larger world - it's either "open source" or hyphenated as in "open-source software": end moan, or should I say eXit ;-)).
Seriously... when Jobs came back to Apple, remember one of the first things he did was to ask what the current line up of machines was and he was totally confused, so he brought everything to order. I seem to remember a similar thing when OS X was announced that he looked at all the artifacts Apple had and while the base was good, many things had gone of in tangents with good ideas, but often opposed to each other. So a big decision was made to bring it all back in and simplify everything. This has worked well for Apple, and their hardware and software lines have been successful, and I don't think OS X would have been such a success without this unifying factor.
I think WebObjects is now at this point. Many people have seen how it could be better and also provided extensions that could have been in WO in the first place. So we have some great facilities in Wonder, the GVCSiteMaker library, etc. I have also written a lot of little utility bits, especially for Java Client, like check boxes and pop up menus in tables.
I'm probably using a fraction of Wonder, and maybe even not much further than making Application extend ERXApplication and Session extend ERXSession. These were excellent in themselves since they did a lot of semantics checking that found little errors in my models which could have caused problems. But of course, this is the kind of checking that could be in the base WOApplication and WOSession. I'm sure a lot of people have their own libraries to do these kinds of things that were developed before Wonder.
Anyway, what I'd like to suggest is that a think tank is formed between all interested parties to rationalize the whole situation and roll a lot of these different directions back into the base, getting the best of all worlds. I hope that doesn't cause the developers of all these libraries too much heartburn - so what do you think?
If Apple made WO open source, then maybe that is something that is doable with their coordination. But if they don't make it open source perhaps some agreement to have different people who have been involved with the libraries work closely with Apple to achieve this goal. I think that such an effort would ensure that WO, Wonder, and GVC all reach a larger development community, so that would be good for all. Also the time to get people into that community would be reduced, as would development time, because all of those great facilities would just be available if needed, without having to develop your own stuff, only to find out that Wonder exists six months later. Even a lot of old time WOers seem to think that Wonder is too much of a learning curve and I can see the pain on both sides here.
So I think some WO rationalization is in order, although I could see it taking a couple of years. What do people think?
Ian Joyner Sportstec On 11/09/2006, at 11:21 PM, James Cicenia wrote: When does Apple drop the second shoe? They said they are working with OpenSource, etc., and will have an announcement again... soon?
It would be nice to hear more from Apple. I mean I am quite sure that 4 developers would have zero impact on their bottom line. And, if they do a good job and WebObjects starts to grow again,,, they will surely sell more servers.
So, Apple, give us some direction.
James Cicenia
On Sep 11, 2006, at 12:25 AM, Ashley Aitken wrote:
On 11/09/2006, at 1:16 PM, Ashley Aitken wrote:
On 10/09/2006, at 11:31 AM, .::welemski::. wrote:
Is WebObjects really going to be openSource?
It depends whether or not you call "deprecating all the current tools, and hoping the community will replace them with open source equivalents and even write a whole lot of new documentation, whilst keeping the core product and documentation proprietary" going open source?
I don't. I call it a great deal, for Apple. They obviously need help these days ...
Now the other side of me (hence the additional post ;-) wonders what else they could have done. Trying to compete with the Java IDEs (like Eclipse and IntelliJ) was a losing battle.
The technology (e.g. the Java Bridge) within some of the current tools (EOModeller, WOBuilder and the Xcode Plugin) was end-of-life'd.
I guess they could have paid a nice salary to a few open source developers, maybe the current ones who have done so much to make this possible, to continue without "the other job."
That said, I believe that there are already a few Apple employees who currently work (at least partly) on the open source tools (at least they are committers).
So maybe it is a reasonable deal for everyone.
Cheers, Ashley2.
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