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. 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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pierce
P.S.
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...
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