Re: OT: Web Objects -- Anybody using it?

FROM : Nicholas Riley
DATE : Tue Nov 12 06:47:28 2002

On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 06:13:02PM -0800, Dave Sopchak wrote:
> On Monday, November 11, 2002, at 10:38 AM, mmalcolm crawford wrote:
>
> >On Monday, November 11, 2002, at 09:06  AM, Ondra Cada wrote:
> >
> >>WO are the best web-app development environment ever made. Alas,
> >>Apple nearly killed it by removing the ObjC support,
> >
> >I would suggest that it was not the removal of Obj-C support per se
> >that "nearly killed it", but rather how the transition was handled
> >(both by Apple, and by some customers).
>
> Could someone explain to me the reasoning behind killing the Obj-C
> support? I've really gotten the hang of this language in the past year
> and love it...why would they remove support for it?

For WebObjects (not talking about EOF for Cocoa, which is something I
think should stick around on OS X only or better yet be open-sourced,
even if it wouldn't get much attention):

- database vendors didn't want to port their EO adaptors to every
  single platform; with Java, WO just uses JDBC and no porting is
  necessary, so WO5 supports a much greater variety of databases
  than Objective-C WO did (excluding the JDBC EOAdaptor of course :)

- Apple didn't want to port their Objective-C runtime and Java bridge
  to more platforms, in particular Win32 and HP-UX were painful, and
  they would have at least had to add x86 Linux (with all the associated
  problems in supporting multiple distributions) to the list.

- Apple didn't want to port the Yellow Box for Windows stuff any
  further - Cocoa for non-OS X platforms is dead.

- there are a lot more libraries for doing enterprise-related stuff in
  Java (and, again, there's little or no porting hassle) compared with
  Objective-C.

- it's easier to deploy Java code than Objective-C code.

- the programming tools (IDEs, debuggers, etc.) for Java are a great
  deal better than those for Objective-C.

Given all that, and having (a) written enterprise database/Web apps in
Java without WO, and (b) used and liked programming WO 4.0-4.5 in
Objective-C, I can see why it made a great deal of sense to move WO5
to Java.

--
=Nicholas Riley <<email_removed>> | <http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/njriley>
        Pablo Research Group, Department of Computer Science and
  Medical Scholars Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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