Re: In need of general WO strategy advice

Hi Will,

On 21/07/2008, at 9:54 PM, Will Scheidegger wrote:

> Dear WO-community
>
> I'm afraid I need some general WO strategic advice. We've been WO  
> developers since the time of Rhapsody - although we've only produced  
> SMB solutions. It was always hard to find developers who were  
> willing to invest time to learn this great technology, because it  
> was always "Apples best kept secret" (TM). And it was not too easy  
> convincing customers to invest money in that technology because in  
> the SMB market everybody's talking about PHP and ASP. But we stuck  
> to it because WO allowed us to do things in a time we could only  
> dream of with other technologies (even with all the WO Builders  
> "features").

Sure.

> What are the reasons nowadays to stick to WO?

- WOLips is advancing at such a pace that is quite seriously  
astonishing when compared with the progress of former WO tools. If you  
have feedback on the tools - then it'd be very worthwhile putting into  
writing any considered feature requests (via jira at objecstyle and/or  
the woproject mailing list.

- Apple is also much more active and community focused than before.  
Bug fixes are happening. Things are arguably moving forward.

- commity is thriving and active (see below)

> - Although I really think the WOLips guys did a great job and I'm  
> sure that mastery comes with practice... I'm really slow with WO  
> Lips compared to XCode / WO Builder / EO Modeler.

Can you be a little more specific about the things that seem counter- 
productive for you?

> - My Leopard / WO Lips development system now produces WO 5.4 apps.  
> Our servers are all Solaris. Is there somewhere a WO 5.4 deployment  
> installer? Or how can I install WO 5.4 on Solaris? Googeling for it  
> and looking at objectstyle.org resulted only in info related to  
> development...

This not help?
http://wiki.objectstyle.org/confluence/display/WO/Programming__WebObjects-Web+Applications-Deployment-Solaris+WO5.3.3

Should be similar for 5.4.

> - Finally: This list has become so quite, I have the feeling that  
> the "community" is close to extinction. Could it be that the other  
> developers have asked themselves these questions a while ago?

The omnigroup mailing list is indeed extremely quiet these days. If  
that's the only mailing list you're on for WO related stuff then I'd  
understand completely how you'd come to the conclusion that the  
community is verging on death.

I suggest you subscribe to the following mailing lists:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]

I think you'll find that the community is thriving and far from dead.

> And for those remaining: How do you justify sticking to WO in this  
> state?

As above.

with regards,
--

Lachlan Deck