So, how shall we proceed as a community? Is the webobjects-dev list
at Apple the appropriate place for everyone to hammer these issue
out? Or, should we spin this discussion off into its own space? And,
if so where should the space exist?
I know Chuck mentioned setting up a website to start generating a
developer database. It would be great if the community could have
some type of way online for everyone to focus on issues, make
decisions, and be productive. Maybe his site could help us focusing
our energy and get moving.
I think this is a great opportunity. Having a real WO community will
allow everyone to grow their abilities and provide a greater
opportunity for more developers to contribute and get involved.
I'm sure there are many folks out there that are willing to
contribute. We may be able to provide a dedicated server and some
rack space. And, I know we can help with the conference registration
process.
-George
On Aug 13, 2006, at 3:01 PM, Pascal Robert wrote:
Your saying is resuming a lot of things that we said between many
of us last week. I also think the same thing as you : stop
thinking of other WO dudes as competition, it's not. Most of us
are not even in the same area or doing the same kind of
applications, so we are NOT competition, we are not enough people
for being it. It would even help us to find help and partners
since most of the WO people are freelancers and small teams.
We were also talking about starting a real community foundation.
So far, we had those ideas :
- built a community/foundation like the Apache
- the foundation goals would be :
- marketing :
- create hype around WebObjects. Let's so those Rby on Rails and
PHP people that WO can create more powerful and scalable stuff
- do basic some marketing by buying some ads on Google
- create comparaisons docs about WO vs the other techs
- having a list of success stories
- members list
- list of people doing WO applications/products
- kind of member : corporate (many WO dudes inside a same
corporation), freelancer (one person) and student
- member detail : number of WO dudes (when the member is a
corporation type), type of industries, location, number of apps
deployed, how many years using WO
- bug reporting tool
- a tool to collect bugs in the frameworks, and also in the open
source tools. For the frameworks, we will be able to report bugs
to Apple and telling them which ones are the more important to fix
- people should be able to see which bugs are still open and vote
for them if they also have the same bug
- if someone has a workaround for a bug, we should be able to
see it
- WO conference
- the foundation should be the organization that prepare the WO
conference
- tools approval
- the foundation should approve versions of WOLips and other open
source tools as stable ones and recommended for production
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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