Re: WO 5.3 Deployment OS X only concerns

On Jun 13, 2005, at 7:04 AM, Wade Price wrote:

> Does anybody have any concerns now that WebObjects 5.3 deployment is 
> only officially supported on OS X?

We've discussed it a bit over on the webobjects-dev list.

Most people seem to be ok with it and view it as a reasonable move by 
Apple to sell more hardware.  Some of us who are selling (or in my 
case, thinking about selling) WO apps to customers who are not already 
hooked on Apple find the decision a bit more unsettling.  It's going to 
be a tough sell to tell someone that in order to use our app they have 
to buy a fairly expensive server that runs a flavor of Unix that's 
non-subtly different (from an admin point of view) from anything else 
they have.  If selling more hardware is the goal then I expect it will 
fail;   the extra XServes sold for WO deployment will be offset (IMHO) 
by those that are never sold because the customer was unable to try out 
WO on hardware they already have before going Apple all the way.

My personal opinion is that the point is not to sell hardware but to 
make life more productive for Apple's internal WO developers.  This 
move gives them a big improvement in their development tools and opens 
the door for them to make enhancements to WO that will only work on OS 
X.  This means, of course, that even the option of running unsupported 
on other platforms may not be available for very long.

As always, Apple remains inscrutable and we'll just have to see what 
they end up doing.

janine