“With price-performance, we’ve seen a lot of interest in our products coming from places we never dreamed we’d seen an Apple logo,” Apple director of server software Tom Goguen told MacNewsWorld. “I believe we’ll have lots of opportunities — we’ll hit video hard and we’ll succeed — but over the long term, we’ll be even more successful outside the video market.” Read the analysis at MacNewsWorld. Elsewhere, Apple Computer is preparing its developer forces for yet another run through the jungle with its next Mac OS X build, code-named Tiger.
Developing Tiger for the Enterprise
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
“We’ve seen with any operating system vendor or major application vendor like Apple or Microsoft or Novell — you live and die by your development community,”
We develop apps with Java and were quite excited at Apple’s plans to include Java packaged with the OS. The reality, however, is that we need to see much better performance (usually related to Swing) before we can seriously push Apple boxes instead of Win/Linux for our business solutions. It would be really nice to see Apple put their Java work back on the forefront of serious technology available for developers.
Instead, developers are offered a scattering of technologies that don’t quite live up the the hype and end up needing to resort to Carbon. Then, to try to create an app based on mixed technologies (i.e. Java GUI elements with Carbon backend) and you end up with all sorts of threading issues that just don’t happen on other platforms. If Apple could get Swing via JNI working correctly with Carbon (to allow new Java apps such as ours to interface/extend legacy apps as developers can already do on Win/Linux) it would be a whole new ball game!
One can hope.
3H
I despise Java, but I understand the market reasons that would make someone use it. I don’t know all the details of your situation, but it seems like it would make a lot more sense to use a Java back-end and a Cocoa front-end on the Mac. It makes sense to me to have the “meat” of an application be cross-platform, but with a native interface, i.e., Cocoa, Win32, etc.
I wish for Groupwise, Lotus Notes, Open Mail, DB2, SAP, Access and Corel Office.
heck yes!!!
oh my god I hate it when java developers insist on using SWING!!!
is it really that more difficult to develop an native interface for the OS they deploy it on?
heck, VB and Apple script can be used to hook into a Java codebase and build the front end making it trivial to make the interface.
For some implementations, the java back end with a native front end is quite desirable. In fact, I’ve done some of those also. But, sometimes a Java GUI is a good way to retrofit new functionality into a legacy app. In Windows, this is much, much easier than trying to do so with a Carbon app…in fact, all research indicates it actually can’t be done properly with Carbon. This is the problem. If Apple wants to attract developers, they will need to provide the mechanism to get done what needs to get done.
Now, one could argue that we should move away from Carbon and use Cocoa with Java. Nice idea.. unfortunately, even Apple is still using Carbon for new development (much of CoreAudio is Carbon). This presents a huge problem for attracting new developers… It’s like Apple is saying “hey! if you want to come develop for some great new technologies, you’ll have to use our wrappers to old thread-problematic APIs.” That’s just not going to cut it for some.
As far as Swing… it’s not inherently bad. We just need VMs (in the case of this thread read: Apple’s VM) to yield better performance for Swing. Also, there is SWT, so just because an app is Java, doesn’t mean it has to perform poorly.
I dream a new OS with a jounlaned file system by Dominic Giampaolo, a data-driven file manager by Pavel Cisler and a interactive GUI by Timothy Martin. :-X
BeOS, you say! 🙂
No, I dream Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger! ;-D
As the wise (ME) says: “Don’t Be different only; Think Different to be the NeXt big thing!” X-D
PS Yes, I’m a Mac Zealot with a VERY CHEAP iBook 12″!
“I dream a new OS with a jounlaned file system by Dominic Giampaolo, a data-driven file manager by Pavel Cisler and a interactive GUI by Timothy Martin. :-X
BeOS, you say! 🙂
No, I dream Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger! ;-D
As the wise (ME) says: “Don’t Be different only; Think Different to be the NeXt big thing!” X-D”
It’s funny just how many people won’t understant that one at all!
don’t you mean NeXT big thing?
are all those guys really at apple now? i seem to remember that some Be members came from apple originally, are any of these guys ex-apple, ex-Be, current-apple employees?
whatever the case, the more Be features that are integrated into OS X, the happier i’ll Be (pun intended?). if they do all the rumored file attribute/finder stuff, AND ramp up their process scheduler (which seems slow to me, definitely not as good as Be’s, possibly not as good as linux 2.6), i might have a new all-time favorite OS.
Just a quick note to reiterate what has already been said, but when you code, on either PC, Linux or Mac, try and keep your busines objects completely seperate from your interface, don’t attach code to your forms etc…
That way, you can write your apps logic with C/++, Java, Perl or Python, any language supported by the platforms you are porting to, and you can write your UI specifically for your native box. For instance, using binding in the Cocoa framework allows you to whip up amazing interfaces with next to no lines of code (for 10.2 or earlier outlets and delegates are pretty easy)…
You can use Delphi, C# (or whatever) on the PC for your interfaces there. I did this on a recent PC app we are building at work, and the benifits were worth the extra time spent (even though we aren’t porting to other platforms yet), especially when dealing with NT Services and COM etc…
I understand that for legacy apps, this may not be possible, or too time consuming, but for new apps, or older systems that lend themselves to this approach, the benifits are worth it…
My point is that you could write your front end on the Mac using Interface builder, or use Swing if you still wanted, or use some other approach.
Oh, and @JohnOne/PowerPPC, with Panther, the world moved beneath our feet, I get the impression we are in for an earthquake with Tiger…
“are all those guys really at apple now? i seem to remember that some Be members came from apple originally, are any of these guys ex-apple, ex-Be, current-apple employees?”
Well for a simple answer, yes. The guys from NeXT are heading Apple (some say NeXT really bought Apple). After Be went under, most of it’s head guys went back to Apple.
Don’t forget Steve Sakoman (more of an exec type these days) but he too went from Apple (he was project lead on the Newton) to Be to Palm (Co-Founder) to PalmSource to Apple.
“this issue is so tired. from the day the mac was released we have heard a 20 year litany of dreams and excuses of why the mac will or won’t work in business. ”
It does. All of the GUI technology was adopted by other companies as well. Apple produces the windows prototypes.