Can anyone give a true state of the union write up as to where we
are with tools and the future based up Leopard now released, the
WWDC over with ( and hopefully any NDAs not infringed ) and the
involvement of WONDER etc...
It would be good to have a coherent vision of what we have and where
we are going....
Here's my notable bullet point list:
* WebObjects is very much alive. WebObjects 5.4 is the first step in
many years of Apple actually trying to move the platform forward, and
more will come.
* EOModeler is dead and gone. Entity Modeler (from the WOLips
project) replaces it. iTunes Store has also funded us to develop
a .app variant of Entity Modeler that you can run outside of Eclipse.
In the current builds, Entity Modeler.app is able to read IDEA and
Eclipse project files to determine model dependencies. NetBeans
project file support is likely also coming.
* WebObjects Builder is dead and gone. Component Editor replaces it.
This is the #1 point of contention, I believe, as Entity Modeler is a
fairly complete replacement for EOModeler. Component Editor does not
provide the equivalent of the quasi-preview mode (the thing that can
do the table editing with binding wiring). It does provide, in recent
builds, component previews that are very similar (I think more useful,
IMNSHO :) ) to WOB's, extensive support for completion, and there is a
new bindings editor coming that is essentially based on the bindings
inspector panel from WOB (for people who don't want to think about it,
the intent is that this can replace the WOD Editor view). For what
I'm doing, this is the majority of my focus at the moment. Well,
"easier-to-use" in general has been my main focus for the past few
weeks. I've been really trying to go through the UI's and tighten
things up (the new Entity Modeler error dialog is a good example of
this). I really want to get the tools to a place where WOB people
aren't totally turned off. I don't know how far that will go at the
moment. Thomas has been my grumpy customer benchmark up until now,
but he's been unusually happy recently. As luck would have it, I
think I have found my new grumpy customer benchmark.
* RuleEditor is dead and gone. Rule Modeler replaces it. Again, not
mine :), but it's in Project Wonder, and from what I hear, it's just
better in every respect. I don't think anyone can be upset about this
one.
* Xcode isn't dead, but WebObjects support in Xcode mostly is. The
build system required to build WO projects is still there. So if you
have existing Xcode projects, they will continue to build. The WO
project templates are gone, but like Ray said, you could pretty easily
bring these back. If Entity Modeler gained support for reading
project/framework dependencies from .xcodeproj files (which I had said
I will not do, but if there's some overwhelming support for this, I
might reconsider ... or if someone else wants to donate that, I will
merge it in) you could actually use Entity Modeler completely as an
EOM replacement. WOB is the big missing piece for Xcodies. There is
BASICALLY no way to make Component Editor a standalone app (it
requires too much in terms of Java project dependencies). Given that
it seems to me that the people most likely to stick with Xcode are
also the people who are probably most upset about the loss of WOB,
this presents an unfortunate situation. The way, truth, and light
from Apple is WOLips and Eclipse, though.
* My understanding is that JavaClient stuff is technically still
there, but there's not very good tool support for it. NetBeans
project file support for Entity Modeler would allow the combination of
Entity Modeler plus the Swing designer tools from NetBeans, which
would probably be a good platform to start from for that (Swing
builders in Eclipse I think mostly suck still?).
* JavaMonitor and wotaskd are open sourced in Leopard. I don't know
if this means that there are replacements coming in future releases
and their value is therefore lessened, or if it is just an act of
goodwill from Apple. Either way it's great.
* EOGenerator, EOReporter, and DBEdit no longer work in Leopard.
Apple has provided a replacement to EOGenerator in the form of
JavaEOGenerator. It will be released as an open source example on the
Apple site within a few weeks. In the meantime, Apple has been
gracious enough to slide permission under the table for us to do
release of it for early adopters (see my previous post). The template
format changes (which is to be expected -- EOGenerator was using a
very old Obj-C library for the template system), but other than that
it should be fully compatible with EOGenerator.
* As far as the involvement of Wonder in all of this, for the most
part, the same relationship remains. Some Wonder code has made it
into the core, and presumably other code will in the future, and this
presents some challenges to the Wonder team in terms of build and
release management, but Wonder is Wonder -- we'll persevere :)
* Anjo fixed up the build system in Wonder a couple days ago to
provide 5.3 / 5.4 builds of Wonder. The build server should be
switching this week sometime.
* WOLips and Entity Modeler already support several of the new 5.4
features (bracketed inline syntax, entity index declaration, strict
template parsing, etc). There are a couple others still to add (the
new EOModel enum stuff, for instance), but nothing that should really
hold people up.
* WO is, by default, run behind Apache 2.2 instead of Apache 1.3.
Welcome to this decade :)
* OpenBase is no longer shipped as the default demo database. Instead
Apache Derby is the demo database.
* Leopard Client does not include the launchd scripts necessarily to
run WO with Apache, but they're easily added and everything still
works fine.
This is all I can think of at the moment ... It's big changes for WO,
especially if you have not been using Project Wonder. Slightly less
so if you are a Wonderite, but like I mentioned before, positive
momentum is a good thing.
ms
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