Re: How viable is Cocoa development?

FROM : Peter Sichel
DATE : Fri Jan 25 22:05:44 2002

At 8:09 PM +0100 1/25/02, David Niemeijer wrote:
>So my questions to you as Cocoa developers are:
>
>1) Whether there are any "big names" depending on Cocoa right now?

  Apple Computer
  Some former NeXT developers (OMNI Group and Stone Design)

Beyond that it's hard to say since any "big name" developer
with a lot of existing code is unlikely to have shipped much
in Cocoa yet.


>2) Why we should move to Cocoa if we want to do OS X only
>development and optimally exploit the potential of OS X?

To save time.  Cocoa really does save a lot of time compared
to PowerPlant or other more traditional Mac environments for
new Mac OS X development.  Your code will be significantly
smaller and more elegant in Cocoa.

Cocoa is OS X native allowing you to call all the other
OS X APIs directly.

The trade off is portability.  Cocoa is a relatively thin
extension on top of C which could be widely ported but it
hasn't been.  The more you use it, the more your code becomes
tied to the Mac or where Apple wants you to go.  There's also
the learning curve for Cocoa itself and finding developers.


>3) Why Apple will "never" unplug Cocoa

"Never" is a long time.  Right now, Cocoa is one of
the best modern development frameworks available.
Apple sees this as a strength to be exploited.

Someday, it too could be retired, but only after
being replaced by other more effective tools that
don't exist yet.

Judging by how long it has taken the main stream to
grudgingly adopt OO programming, Cocoa should be
around for a while.

- Peter
--