Re: Snow Leopard compatibility and the future of webobjects
Re: Snow Leopard compatibility and the future of webobjects
- Subject: Re: Snow Leopard compatibility and the future of webobjects
- From: Mike Schrag <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2009 11:50:34 -0400
I knew that the WO runtime has been improved over year, and Apple uses
many WO in their web applications notheless internal or external. What
I concerned about the future of WO is, will Apple promote WO to
public? Go to http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/ check how
many WO documents were produced after 2007. Only 4. The latest one
even doesn't finished yet. The example code come with Xcode are a bit
outdated and problematic. I still remember how stupid I were last year
when I came to WWDC WebObjects Lab. However, even Pascal Robert can't
get the Apple examples compiled on my system. I'm not sure if Apple
has fixed that, but the environment is unfriendly to new learner.
I agree that the WO new user experience is pretty lousy. However, I'm
not sure why we should look at the WO community any differently than,
say, the Rails community. In almost every other community, it's the
people in the community who are producing content for everyone else.
If you think the intro to WO material sucks, then help produce some
new content and examples. That's how any community stays vibrant -- by
having members that involve themselves in making it compelling. This
is why mDimension, Chuck/GVC, Anjo, Quinton, Henrique, Lachlan, and
all the other people do what they do. I think we all recognize that WO
is powerful and contributing keeps it fresh and moving forward.
Incidentally, when I work on Cocoa, I'm just as likely to find answers
on cocoadev or the mailing lists as I am to find it in Apple's
prepared material. From my perspective, who cares if Apple produces
content or promotes WO? Is WO great? Does it solve problems for you
better than the alternative? It does for me, too, and I'll continue
to use it as long as it's more compelling than the alternatives.
Besides the lack of documentation, another point is how much effort
made by Apple goes directly into the community. Of course WOLips will
be benefit if WO runtime has improvements, but did Apple ever sponsor
WOLips just like what they did to clang? Or any WO-related thing Apple
want to make it as industry standard just like block in C, OpenCL,
llvm?
Actualy Apple DOES sponsor WOLips. The standalone Entity Modeler and
EOModelDoc were sponsored by iTunes (as I've mentioned previously on
the list), and quite a few other enhancements over the past several
months that I've worked on have also been funded by Apple. Apple is
also actively working on Maven features and support (if you're into
that sort of thing :) ). Additionally, the work to modify Project
Wonder to support future versions of WO was in part funded by Apple.
I mean, if they improve WO just only becasue they have a lot of WO web
apps (think about what Adobe will do if they are accessible to carbon
frameworks--make a 64bit version without a totally rewrite) and are
going to use WO only for Apple's own applications without promoting to
public, it's not a good thing to developers outside Apple.
The template parser (along with quite a few other enhancements) in WO
5.4.3 came directly from the Apple Online Store. In fact, Drew
Davidson from AOS gave a great presentation on it at WOWODC this year.
You are mistaken if you think that Apple's internal development
doesn't feed the WebObjects community.
Even Apple's current wo apps were not good testimonials for WO.
Based on what? That's a big statement.
(1) I often got a seesion timeout when I download iPhone SDK or
something right after I login into developer program page.
The iPhone Developer page isn't WO. It's .action URLs, which i
BELIEVE is Struts. The downloader app might be WO.
(2) The session management is a mess in iTunesConnect.
Honestly ... Never seen those problems with it, but maybe that's just
me. I definitely won't give iTC an Apple Design Award, though :)
(3) When I click into an article in page 3 of devforum and jump back,
it goes to page 1.
The dev forums aren't WO -- It's Jive, a commercial JSP-based forum
product.
(4) Short-lived session (since I type English very slow, RADAR often
kicks me out.)
Log a radar :) Sorry .. I couldn't resist.
(5) Apple Online Store made some bad assumption on the name of
customer and rewrite the bad data to apple acount. No way to change.
One of my friend got his name displayed on AppStore as "股公司
liu" for a
long time. The first part is not even part of his name!
What I said is, Apple's current wo apps are not good web apps comaring
to other web apps I've used.
Since it's not an excellent web app (no matter what cause that), it
will not be a good testimonial of WO.
To each his own, I suppose. I actually think AOS is a pretty nice app
-- certainly as good (and slicker in several ways) than it's
equivalently-sized competitors (Amazon, Dell, etc). Concierge is very
slick. MobileMe is about as modern as you can get. One-to-One is also
cool. iTunes is one of the biggest apps on the web and works pretty
darn well.
Regardless, I think WO is actually thriving (as much as our little
part of the world thrives :) ).
ms
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Webobjects-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden