Same here.
The one thing I think is very important is to take a page from the
Republican playbook. Stop saying "WO isn't dead". I would like to
have a funeral for that phrase, because the more people say it, the
more people ask the question - "Is WO dead?".
What say you! ?
Ken
On Aug 13, 2006, at 4:38 PM, Chuck Hill wrote:
Hi,
I have been trying to keep my mouth shut on this, not something
that I am good at. :-) Pierce said so many smart things that I
feel compelled to ride on hit coattails and chime in a bit.
On Aug 13, 2006, at 11:07 AM, Pierce T. Wetter III wrote:
I challenge the fundamental premise of this thread.
Bottom Line:
The collection of people who know/love WebObjects need to start
thinking of themselves as "The WebObjects Community" and start
thinking of Apple as "one of the major contributors to WebObjects".
That is, even without any NDA info, I can easily point out from
what Apple has
said long ago in public that they consider WebObjects more of a
technology then a product. That happened when they made it free on
MacOSX.
Yet these days, a thriving internet technology needs a thriving
community. We need to stop expecting Apple to lead WebObjects
somewhere.
Yes. Yes. Yes. We need to stop moaning, "Somebody needs to do
something!". And that means YOU not some other anonymous reader of
this list. A lot of us have already done a lot of work with blogs,
pod casts, videos, Open Source contributions, books, training etc.
It is time to put up or shut up.
Apple uses WO in house to a huge extent. They are going to
continue to maintain and enhance WO. So its not, and never will be
"dead", despite the rumors every year.
Right. WO is not dead and is not going to be dead. The question
is not "Is WO dead?" but "What are we as the community going to do,
whine or make the things we say that we need?" Apple does not need
them so it is not going to make them.
But at this point the community has surpassed Apple. It wasn't
Apple who worked so hard to get WOLips working, write an EOModel
editor from scratch, or write a Rules editor they now consider
superior to their own. Every day there is more open source code in
"WebObjects" as used by most WO developers. At some point, the
community will have contributed more source to WO then Apple has.
[if they haven't already, I haven't compared the source output
from the jad decompiler to Wonder lately.]
"Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way".
Amen. Absolutely need a WYSIWYG editor? Make one! Don't whine
about how what others have made for their needs does not fit your
needs. They don't have any obligation to make one for you and
probably no interest, otherwise they would have already done it.
We are all developers, if the need is great we can do it. We all
know how it goes: define the requirements, decide on architecture,
generate the specifications, write the documentation and test plan,
develop the code, test it, and release. It is what we do every
day. We need to get organized.
Apple hasn't really been leading WO since about 5.0. They
haven't been following the community either, because there's been
no community. (In fact, its only the last year or so that WO
programmers have started thinking of themselves as a community.) I
can't tell you what Apple said at WWDC, but I can tell you my
take: Apple is getting out of the way.
And while you really can't tell it from the recent messages on the
list, the community did really gel at WWDC. I was very positive on
Friday. Now, reading all this on the list, I am feeling much less so.
It's up to us to rise to the challenge.
Recently, as part of my job search, I was talking to the
President of a firm that employs about 20 WO programmers. He told
me that he was worried about the future of WO, so he was trying to
port some of his stuff to Hibernate/Struts.
It was impossible (a hello world app requires 200 lines of XML
code first...), so now he's shopping for a J2EE technology that is
as capable as WO. He hasn't found one.
And, as most of us know, he isn't going to find one.
There are quite a few WO shops out there who have built up their
own in-house libraries. That's one of the key competitive
advantages of WO: the more work you do, the more you can get done.
Perhaps those houses need to stop thinking of the other WO
consultants as your competition and start thinking of them as your
allies. You need to start contributing to Wonder, so that you and
your allies get web applications jobs rather then the hordes of
nameless idiot J2EE developers.
That is, the stronger the WO community as a whole becomes, the
richer everyone in the WO community gets. So if you work at as WO
consulting firm, have you thought about open-sourcing your
internal frameworks? Would you rather make $150/hour doing WO or
$75/hour editing XML files in Hibernate? When you keep your
internal frameworks proprietary, that's the choice you're making.
And GVC has done just this. The frameworks that we once considered
(correctly too I might add) our competitive advantage are now Open
Source (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gvcsitemaker in case you
missed it). We are updating these and will periodically post new
versions. Anything we develop in the future will be Open Sourced
as well. Take a look at the reusable code you have laying around
(and not reusable stuff as examples too). Can it be Open Sourced?
Which brings us to the premise of the thread.
We're WO developers, not marketeers. We don't need to market WO,
we need to contribute our code to the community. With a thriving
community comes interest, O'Reilly books, and magazine articles.
WO is a development system, not a new car, having an ad won't get
people interested.
Yep, ever seen an ad for Ruby on Rails?
If we do that, I think we'll find that more and more of what
Apple does with WO gets open sourced. They already contribute to
Wonder. When the community reaches the point that the closed
source portion of WO is only 25% of the total, I think that either:
1. We won't need Apple anymore at all and someone may dig in
and replace everything.
2. Apple will open source the rest.
So we need not market WebObjects. Market yourself as a web
application developer, and realize that one of the best ways to
market yourself as an app developer is to contribute to the
community. When I was an independent consultant, every time I
contributed back to the community, I was able to bill at a higher
rate, because people/firms who contribute to the community end up
being recognized as experts by that community. I reaped far more
then I sowed.
One other thing we can do to help ourselves is to generate
awareness of WebObjects locally. Is there a Java user group in
your area? Give a presentation on WebObjects. "Java Runs Ruby Off
the Rails" ought to get quite an audience. The more technical
people that know about WO, the more people will want it. That
means more business for us and a larger community.
None of this required any NDA knowledge (I had these thoughts
before the show.) so you non-WWDC attendees can feel free to chime
in before whatever public announcements come.
One non-Apple thing I took away from the show: There are
actually more WO programmers then there have been in the past
(post-bubble was especially bad), and that we all have started to
think of ourselves as a community.
_Apple_ may only be making a few _billion_ a year on WO (if you
count the iTunes Music Store), but there are quite a few of us
making money on WO beyond that. So the community isn't going to go
away and WebObjects isn't going to go away. So enough FUD!
Instead, lets make the community so strong, that in two years,
Apple is proposing to US what it would like to see in WO, and
we're considering it...
Now THAT I would like to see!
Chuck
--
Coming sometime... - an introduction to web applications using
WebObjects and Xcode http://www.global-village.net/wointro
Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their
overall knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve specific
problems. http://www.global-village.net/products/
practical_webobjects
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