Re: Re[2]: Objective-C 2.0 and other new features in Leopard

[Helge Hess]

On 23.11.2007, at 19:48, David Chisnall wrote:
> Looking at things like SOGO and other WebObjects applications make  
> it seem so tantalising


Just for the record, SOGo (http://www.scalableogo.org/) is NOT a  
WebObjects application. It makes heavy use of (is built around) SOPE  
specific REST features (SoObjects) and is far from being compatible  
with WO (though it does reuse a lot of WO concepts). It doesn't even  
use the ORM features of EOF, just the adaptor and a content storage  
framework called GCS.

Ie you definitely can't compile SOGo against gstep-web.
[and yes, SOPE specific stuff is even less documented than WO ;->]

But really, you will never get an ObjC framework as easy to learn as  
a framework built on interpreted languages, be it Seaside, RoR or  
Zope. If you start with ObjC, you always need to deal with RC, with  
makefiles, with GCC, etc etc.
Notably this *does* have significant advantages. You get much higher  
speed, you get "native" Unix servers instead of something running in  
some "VM", etc etc. The cool thing about ObjC is that its probably  
the most low level very high level language ;-)
[Note: ObjC 2.0 GC might make it a lot easier, but only if GNU  
manages to provide that too. I think its a major turning point.]

Documentation. Hm, I think its really hard. I always found it hard to  
explain why a WO component works different to a PHP page because the  
huge advantages live in small details. Probably it comes down to the  
fact that developers are not good at documenting stuff for others :-)
You push the Seaside documentation, but the ZopeBook is SUPER GREAT  
too, and the RoR tutorials are not bad either.
I completely agree that good documentation is crucial if you want to  
make a framework succeed widely. UNLESS you want a built an exact  
clone (which probably is true for gstep-gui and gstep-web). In this  
case the developers can focus on compat instead of docs.

Greets,
  Helge
--
Helge Hess
http://www.helgehess.eu/