Aaron,
I actually do agree with you. It is very odd to have WebObjects delivered and installed by Xcode, with project templates provided within Xcode, to produce applications that you can't (reasonably) build using Xcode.
I completely agree with Apple's strategy for divorcing WebObjects from Xcode. Xcode needs to be the very best that it can be at building Macintosh applications. Having it attempt to work well with Java must have been a major hinderance to what should be the primary focus of Xcode, which is Objective C, C++, and C.
Xcode, in my opinion, is absolutely the best C based IDE I've ever used, or had any experience with. Practically, none of the problems that Java developers complain about in Xcode exist when using it to build Obj-C applications. For example "Code Sense" for Obj-C works many time better in Obj-C code than it does in Java.
Extracting Java from Xcode will allow Apple to greatly enhance this IDE. As we know, from publicly released information, Xcode 3.0 has many enhancement being added, such as refactoring, code folding and code focus, and many new features too numerous to mention. I'm fairly certain that adding these features while maintaining compatibility with Java would have significantly slowed their development.
I for one am glad to see Java in Xcode go away. There are several options available for building Java, so trimming this fat from Xcode will be the best thing that ever happened to Xcode.
At the risk of starting another flame war, I'd love to see WebObjects divorced from Java. I'd love to see Apple take their old WebObjects Obj-C code base, enhance it to take full advantage of Objective C 2.0, and make it feature compliant with WO 5.3.3. In this case Xcode 3.0 would become the premiere IDE for building both Macintosh desktop applications and Web based applications. Or even better they could take the more modern Core Data framework and extend it with full awareness of RDBMS databases as a replacement for EOF.
In my opinion moving WebObjects from Obj-C to Java was one of the best, and worst, decisions Apple has ever made regarding server-side web application development. At the time it made a lot of sense. Today, not so much. There is tremendous competition in the Java web application space, and some are moving forward much faster than WO. I don't know if they've really caught up with WO yet, but at the current pace it won't be long until they do. It's hard to stay ahead of the race when you're standing still.
On May 9, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Aaron Thompson wrote: