This and subsequent chapters in this book introduce you to Web services available on Mac OS X. The toolkits and frameworks, including Apple’s WebServicesCore.framework, a client-side framework for accessing Web services from Mac OS X which is new in Mac OS X version 10.2, are discussed in Chapter “Tasks”. Some of the tools and techniques for writing Web services glue and adding it to Cocoa, Carbon and AppleScript applications are also discussed.
Introduction to MacOSX Web Services
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Another good source for web-development with OS X:
http://developer.apple.com/internet/index.html
Regards,
Ralf.
It result ironical to me than Apple is supporting Microsoft .net
Uh… How is Apple supporting MS .NET? Because you can use OS X to create web services? Or what is there I can’t find anything in the linked story or Eugenia’s commant to hint to that. If it is the former, perhaps it would be good to point out the web services are not exclusive to .NET. You can write web services in languages and development systems that have no relation to any Microsoft technology. Web services in Carbon (with C), Cocoa (with Objective-C) and AppleScript are not for .NET. Maybe someday there will be an AppleScript.NET interpreter, but this isn’t what is being discussed.
I apologize to for my naïve comment, I believed than Web Services was the Microsoft name for distributed object. I need to read a good book about it.
Someone actually admitted they were wrong. Cool give the man some props for saying he mispoke.
Apple doesn’t actually support Microsoft, but they do support Soap calls, which comes from Microsoft. Soap became a standard and many companies adopted that, but Sun, Microsoft’s most furious enemy, didn’t support it originally. Now they also support Soap.
Although you can write web services with any platform, Microsoft and IBM is the number one in this area, and I don’t think that mission critical applications will ever be written in Apple. Apple is not a serious company in this field.
Apple is not a serious company in this field.
That’s funny, considering OS X is home to two of the only useful web services applications out there (Watson and Sherlock)
Apple is not a serious company in this field.
Heh. WebObjects may not be the biggest player, but it’s a pretty well done web app/service server. Real-live mission critical “enterprise” apps have been written in it, by a number of clients.
I don’t do web services development myself, but Apple uses WO to run their on-line store. Dell USED to (but switched to another product when NeXT got bought). It is supposed to be pretty slick. One probably shouldn’t right it off because it isn’t from IBM/MSFT/Novell. If anything, that should be a plus. I can’t say that, e.g. IBM Lotus Domino products impress me.
Dell USED to (but switched to another product when NeXT got bought). It is supposed to be pretty slick.
My understanding is that Microsoft paid the costs for Dell to move their store to ASP. It ended up taking forever and something like 10x the effort to reproduce what some skilled WO programmers did in a short period of time.
What they ended up with initially was something that did less and was less robust. Later it became a solid site, but with enough engineering, you can run a Yugo in the INDY 500. This was a big blow to NeXT since it was such an early high-profile online store that had “WebObjects.exe” in every URL. BTW, this changeover happened before the NeXT takeover of Apple
The key value to WO is that the effort to make a usable app is much less than other technologies. Taking it from “usable” to “secure and robust” still takes a lot of work though.
I’ve actually done some work with the 5.2 WebServices and, from what I know about other ways to do it, they have scored big-time in terms of ease of use. This could finally be something that will sneak them in the door of some more high-profile companies.
The major problem for Apple is that it still kind of sucks to develop WO on Windows boxes. The tools have some serious cobwebs. Apple needs to make this stuff work better out of the box with IDEs like IDEA, Eclipse (good opensource work being done here), etc.. Requiring that developers use a second set of dev tools that haven’t changed since 1998 and that are only qualified to run on Win2k is a tough sell.
You are correct in saying that the original Dell Web storefront was implemented and run on WO. At the time WO was heads-and-shoulders over its app server competition, especially in terms of database connectivity, ease of development and operations, and scalability.
The *real* reason Dell switched from WO had nothing to do with the Apple acquisition of NeXT, and everything to do with Microsoft flexing some muscle. Seems like Gates and Co. were not too happy that their flagship hardware vendor was using a Unix-based app server at the core of its business, and “incentivized” Dell to switch their otherwise well implemented and functioning WO-based E-commerce site to ASP.
The funny thing was that migrating the Dell storefront to ASP proved to be a much greater hardship than the original ground-up WO development had been, and when the Dell developers hit instances where the MS technology just plain didn’t work, Microsoft had to deploy a team of their own developers on-site at Dell to implement all the work arounds and custom code required to get the new ASP-based site up and running.