Subject: Re: Help me please to find a job in Cocoa
From: Bill Bumgarner
To: Cocoa-dev
If you aren't into flogging dead horses, skip this...
> You know, they [being NeXT] had OpenStep running quite happily on
> Window's boxes, natively. Sure, you had to install a pretty large
> runtime [ala Java], but application bundles included both 68K and
> x86 binaries and ran natively.
That's quite the stretch... it wasn't running quite happily, it was
running with some extreme limitations and caveats. Windows is not
designed to allow for a client/server based rendering environment
such as that demanded by the combination of an application rendering
and processing events through the Display PostScript Server. The
only way to make it run reasonably well was to adjust the Windows
task scheduler to not focus cycles on the foreground task, but doing
that would adversely affect every other Windows app that assumed the
default scheduling model. That was but one of many problems with
OpenStep on Windows.
Which brings up a second point; the DPS server. The licensing of DPS
was, in and of itself, extremely limiting to the future of the
platform. It was costly for NeXT to ship production licenses and the
implementation was not of the type that could allow for the
flexibility and capabilities of Quartz.
OpenStep for Windows - which died with the name Yellow box - was a
wonderful environment for development work targeted to the
deployment of applications into highly controlled, typically
corporate, environments. It was not suitable for applications
destined to more generic marketplaces.
Nor does it provide a reasonable foundation for the implementation
of a modern OpenStep implementation on Windows.
It would take an absolutely tremendous amount of engineering effort
to bring the OpenStep APIs we use today to the Windows platform -
that is, to bring a reasonable subset of Cocoa, including rendering
capabilities and appropriate bits of the Core. It would require a
completely new rendering model and significant architecture and
engineering efforts focused on dealing with the differences between
OS X and Windows from a user perspective. On top of that, one would
also have to bring over Project Builder and Interface Builder - no
trivial tasks in and of themselves (and each is becoming more
advanced and more complex with each release).
It certainly could be done and maybe Apple is even working on it now
- too debate future [non]product directions of Apple is not the
point of this thread. The point is more that bringing Cocoa to
Windows is not simply a matter of resurrecting the Yellow for
Windows product.
With all that said, OpenStep for Windows is still a shipping product
the last time I checked! WebObjects still includes a full
development environment for Windows.
b.bum
(Who worked with Yellow/Windows for a number of years - including
doing development work targeted to deployment on that platform. It
was unpleasant, certainly not of the quality that you would want to
deploy without active sys-admin support.)