On 13/09/2006, at 10:55 AM, Tom Marchand wrote: To be sent to the Software Graveyard.
Ah, alas, but why? Some reasons why MacApp suffered that fate was that it never really became *the* way to program OS 9. Most developers just stuck with toolbox. MacApp was a really nice framework, but in the early days (0.3), the documentation was really bad. Many Apple examples have been poor quality, I think being left to be written by their not so good programmers - style was all over the place making it difficult to understand.
Then of course they rewrote MacApp in C++, which was a disaster - a high-level framework being redone in a low-level and mega-trap language. Then NeXT came along with Cocoa and showed how frameworks should be done anyway, so MacApp was quietly dropped. I think that in comparison, WO is in a strong position - it actually solves a problem that is still there (just like mainframes!, only not such a niche market).
Well my comments on consolidation of WO with various extension libraries has been met with deafening silence, so I conclude that it is not that interesting to people, or no one really wants to work together on this, or the NDAs from WWDC are so closely connected to what I suggested that no one is allowed to comment! I hope it's the last.
Ian On Sep 11, 2006, at 10:25 PM, Ian Joyner wrote: On 12/09/2006, at 11:15 AM, Tom Marchand wrote: Is it possible that WO will suffer the fate of HyperCard? I hope not.
Which was?
I did think of the fate of MacApp, but I can think of reasons why WO is different. On Sep 11, 2006, at 8:34 PM, Ian Joyner wrote: (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
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