On 16/03/2008, at 2:04 PM, Franco Borgo wrote:
On Mar 13, 2008, at 18:51, Gavin Eadie wrote:
>Actually, I believe I've noticed a slight up-tick in the number of 'novice' WebObjects users in the WebObjects and WOLips/Wonder mailing lists.
>If this is not my imagination, there's still people out there joining our platform .. Gavin
Being one of the Newbie... since 2006 :-), I would say that Apple behavior with WO is clearly sending me a signal to move to something else.
I am more of a scientific, no GUI, type of programer. Even being new to WO and Java, I was able to quickly build a very powerful Web-App with nice GUI with WO Builder and old Apple Tutorial. Without them, I am lost.
Actually I think Apple is showing a more encouraging commitment to WO now than they did back in 2006, wwdc coverage aside. They might have amputated WOBuilder and EOModeler, but they were already on death row due to their age, the evolution of html, css and ajax and their reliance on the not so loved Java-Cocoa bridge. The open source tools, namely wolips, might not yet provide all the convenience features and efficiencies of the old tools, but we as a community are working to ensure they will be even better than their predecessors.
I feel a lot more confident about using WO for new work now than I ever have in the past couple of years.
I have tried WOLips with Eclipse and I am nowhere near where I was with WO two years ago. People told me that WO had a steep learning curve. To me it is Eclipse that I find difficult to grasp.
This is a very valid observation. WO itself can be leveraged without a lot of knowledge about how it works, unfortunately that doesn't eliminate the need to understand the tools that make that possible. WOLips is biased towards people who are already familiar with using programming IDEs or familiar with WO development. It leaves the novice somewhat overwhelmed, but this will improve with time and help from people like yourself to identify how things could be made better for beginners.
I am sure that Eclipse can do everything pretty good, but to me, WO was great at one thing, helping me bring my idea to the web very fast and quite easily.
I hope this is still true, or at least can be again with the help of a bit of polish to wolips by the many people who volunteer their time and money to make things better for everyone in the community.