According to statistics, Java continues to have the crown of the most used VM-based platform in the industry. However, Microsoft’s C# and .NET gain ground every day. While C# might or might not overcome Java in the following years, the fact remains that more and more programmers want the choice of C# among their developer tools. So, where does this situation leave Apple?I believe that Apple has either already started porting an existing C#/.NET platform or they are building their own (maybe based on Mono or Portable.NET). The reasons behind this belief are:
1. Apple can’t afford to possibly lose some commercial developers to C# and .NET.
2. If there is a reason to support Java, there is an equal reason to support C#. This reason gets more important by the day.
3. More and more apps are getting written in C# or Windows.Forms and so Apple would need a way of bringing application ports to OSX (so far C or C++ Windows applications were portable-enough to the Mac, but C#-based apps?).
4. Creating Cocoa# bindings shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve, especially if Apple ports Mono (which is already able to run on OSX more or less, hence a port will be “easy/cheap enough” to justify).
5. Support for ASP.NET (via Apache) is also paramount for the same reason the plain ASP module for Apache was: interoperability for web code especially between software houses and web servers.
6. Apple simply can’t afford not to be ahead of the times. If something “big” is out there, Apple has showed in the past that they will eventually support it.
Some will say that Apple will never want to strengthen Microsoft’s position with .NET, but this is already too late. Latest statistics show Apple below 2% of global desktop usage and so Apple is not in a position to play such business games. Once upon a time, when Apple used to have above 10% of market share they were able to decide if they wanted to make the life of Microsoft more difficult or not, but today, by not going with the times and supporting the latest and greatest it would be Apple in the loss, not Microsoft. Apple is not as a dangerous competitor to Microsoft as it used to be. Funnily, if Apple decide to not officially support C# or Mono, Apple will also be losing to Linux!
Others will claim that C# and .NET is not important, but these people will probably be non-Windows developers. The reality of business today for Apple is that it is craving for Windows application ports. If these Windows developers are not satisfied with the developer tools they won’t be looking at Apple as their alternative market, but quite possibly, at Linux.
If we see a .NET-like implementation (with or without Windows.Forms) for Mac OS X this year, it probably means that Apple have licensed Microsoft’s code. If we see such an implementation next year (around 2005) it will probably mean that Apple will be using Mono (which is arguably more mature than Portable.NET). But no matter which engine they will use, one thing is clear, Apple can’t afford to not support at least one.
I do not get your logic.
It’s like saying MFC and VB has huge market share so apple can’t afford not to support it. Java is years ahead in maturity and apple can live without .NET hype.
I do not get *your* logic.
1. .NET is not hype, it is quite real and has a lot of support already.
2. MFCs and VB are not the same as the .NET VM. Doing a port of the MFCs it would be crazy. But doing a port of Mono and some bindings for Cocoa# is cheaper and doable.
3. It is not just about applications. It is also about ASP.NET. When I used to work as a web developer, I had a helluva time working with Mac web developers from another company because their machines couldn’t run ASP and so we couldn’t work together (that was back in 1999). Porting Mono, clears up this problem (for the most part).
Apple had and still has the better frameworks (compared to VB, MFC and .NET). Why would it jump into .NET? What would it buy Apple? Web services? ASP.NET? you can do all these with Java.
The hidden party is IBM! IBM for years has played multiple sides of the field, quietly alligning with anybody who will give them an inroad. I’ve already read articles about .net support for IBM Big Iron servers [but I can’t remember off hand]. In the end, It’s going to be the quiet companies that win this, not the vocal ones. IBM is great “glue” for any network…which is why the linux thing works for them. Linux is just another checkbox to add that opens a whole new group of features…mostly it KEEPS CUSTOMERS FROM LEAVING IBM big iron!!!
I think that apple will buy-in to .net or at least an implementation of mono? Apple like IBM, has stayed alive and profitable by being everything to everyone who’s their customer. Playing nice helps them to get a few macs in here and there in networks dominated by other systems. I could see Apples Xservers playing “poor boy” to IBM’s AS400 lines. The ability of Apple to play very nice on a network with Windows, Novell, and Linux puts them in key position for shops that want simple, open IT infrastructure…without being OSS gurus. With the BSD base and Fink for Linux programs, the Xserver costs no more than comparable X86 servers…without the Cals…so it’s comparable to an enterprise RedHat or SuSe box. Adding .net to such a server would be a great feature to have because you’d need it for some intranet/email features…and to play nice with windows PCs.
“Latest statistics show Apple below 2% of global desktop usage”
When I hear comments like this I want to screm. The context you are using it suggests that Apple’s marketshare equates to two percent of all computers being used.
As has been repeated time and time again, market share is a figure generated by rterly or anual sales figures. It doesn’t translate to the more accurate statistic “installed base (which is the context you used in this instance)
Macs tend to not be replaced quite as often as their Windows PC counterparts. Because of this, a new PC is bought and sold for the same single individual many times over while the Mac user will have continued to use the same computer for far much longer.
I know this is off topic, but it needed to be said lest an even greater number of consumers be mislead by the figure and be hesitant to upgrade to a Mac and thus make this misapropriate of facts a self fullfilled prophecy.
I hope Apple isn’t stupid enough to follow the .NET bandwagon. Admittedly, I’m biased against VM-based platforms in general. But I need to emphasize that .NET is/was not designed for anything but Longhorn and Longhorn applications. In other words, .NET is designed for Windows to be used by Windows for Windows developers.
Any attempt to try to circumvent that intentional design implementation will continue to be a hack. And any clone implementation, such as mono, will continue to be at the mercy of Microsoft’s decision and a step or several behind Microsoft’s implementations, again just like mono.
Now, Java is a different story. Java was designed to be used on a multitude of platforms right from the scratch, hence the partial reason for its mediocre acceptance. I’m vehemently against VM-based platforms in general but I’m at least lenient towards Java primarily because SUN designed it to be portable from the scratch and so we don’t need hacks for different implementations on different platforms at least theoretically. So Java scores their.
.NET on the other hand is horrible restrictive and locked to one platform today, Windows. No, the Linux port is incomplete, untested, not portable, not trusted and not mature. If I had my way, VM-based platforms will be banned, at least until they are as mature, as tested, as trusted, as researched, as deployable, as fast, as resource friendly and as portable as C/C++. And we all know that will be in another 5-30years, right?
>ASP.NET? you can do all these with Java.
What if I want to run a web application I wrote on ASP.NET on these nicely looking XServes? The point of the matter is, Apple is now into workstation/server market with the Unix-based Mac OS X, so it makes sense to support as many such technologies as possible.
And why are you speaking of Java in particular? You can do whatever you want with Cocoa too, still though, Apple created Carbon for compatibility sake. Same would be for .NET apps because the whole point of VMs is to be able to port/run-directly applications easily.
.NET is nothing but lots of matketing,
Don’t get me wrong, C# is a nice lang, but it is still essentially the same as Java (perhaps w/ more syntactic sugar).
There are many alternatives that apple could choose to support. Being that OS X is Based on unix it already has way more, and IMHO way better, delelopment tools at it’s disposal. If you need proof then I will defer you to the 3rd chapter of the “pragmatic programmer” for an explination of why.
Speaking of the statistics, at what rate are people moving away from proprietary solutions and toward open source ones? Perhaps apple is in a better position then the author gives them credit for…
the more I use Java, the more I like it, except for annoyances like operators that can’t be overloaded, and no pointers. C# is kinda like C++, but not as fast. kinda like Java, but not as defined. imho apple should steer clear of C# and put more energy into improving OSX, which still stinks too much to replace win2k on my network.
Is it Apple’s duty to push .NET on their platform or is it Microsoft’s duty. I remember clearly when Java came out, SUN did its best to push Java on as many platforms as possible. If MS really wants .NET to be used on other platforms, don’t you think they will be involved in majority of the pushing and porting?
As it stands today, I doubt Microsoft will be pleased if developers started migrating to Mac or Linux. After all, their goal is to monopolize and lock as many developers as possible, like they’ve done over the years.
You are forgetting that Microsoft already supports Mac OS X in SSCLI
(Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure), alias Rotor, and on
the Internet you can find the patches to compile it under Panther.
It doesn’t matter if .net fails or not…if it becomes ubiquitous in a less than MS implementation, then It’s “stalled” like Java!
Let’s face it the majority of .net implementations for now are going to be in-house jobs such as intranets for WinPC networks. I don’t know what DBs run on OSX, but if I was building a small office or plant from scratch, I’d definately consider XServers over some other platforms as my backend. MS .net is essentially the new VB…and there are lots of ways to convert old VB code to new .net. the real world runs on “gluing” tech together. All apple needs is a good enough implementation so you can glue the various PC programs [PLCs, timeclocks, MS access, etc] into a Database and email system on XServer. I’ve done AS400 work and VB’s what keeps it alive in all windows shops…VB that was the “glue” for MS last generation. It’s quick and simple for non-programmers to connect prepackaged stuff together!! It doesn’t have to RUN canned .net apps, just let you use your MS .net studio to write a few “scripts”.
I can agree with the arguement for .Net as far as ASP .Net for web services, but even in that arena there are plenty of cross platform alternatives. PHP, Java (again) Servlets/JSP, even CGI with Perl scripts.
Because MacOSX is Unix-like it just seems more logical to use software solutions in the realm of Unix. Then again, that doesn’t stop *nix developers from creating that bridge between Unix and Windows: Mono is living proof of that, and so are other examples such as the Direct3D to OpenGL wrapper, and the ASP module for Apache (although limited).
Put aside the mentality of a developer, because developers who are fueled with enough enthusiasm can do anything (ReactOS team is recreating Windows as we speak). So lets think like business men and women. Eugenia made an example by saying how hard it was for her to work with Mac web developers simply because they couldn’t run ASP scripts. No offense to anyone, and all due respect to Eugenia, if the people she worked with were serious about their project, they’d look for a solution that works best for them. On the flip side, Eugenia could (and probably did) find a work around for the lack of ASP capability. Be it porting the web app into another language or finding an existing package. I don’t know all the details involved with that case so I’m not making any assumptions, I just wanted to illustrate a hypothetical situation.
Why do companies have to feel that just because they don’t do the newest, hippest “trend”, that they are some how behind or obsolete. Do your customers care whether you use ASP with or without .Net? Do they care what server side scripting engine you run your site on? Get the job done however it makes sense to you and easiest for you, that’s the bottomline that companies should focus on.
Apple does not need to invest their own man power into .Net. If the community of developers see a need for it, they will port it themselves and it will happen. If Apple later decides “oh Mono is a great idea and should be officially supported on MacOSX” then they’ll invest money and time towards it. Just like they did with their Safari web browser. They worked with the KHTML (did I get that right? It’s KHTML engine in Safari right?) team to produce “Web Core” for MacOSX which Safari uses and any MacOSX app has access to. In return the KHTML team gets the man hours Apple invested.
> What if I want to run a web application I wrote on ASP.NET
> on these nicely looking XServes? The point of the matter is,
> Apple is now into workstation/server market with the
> Unix-based Mac OS X, so it makes sense to support as many
> such technologies as possible.
But if you want to use portable applications you want to use a portable software platform. Like root nicely put it .Net is all about Windows world. M$ has no precedent in supporting other platforms but Windows. .Net is better than previous development platforms based on Windows and that’s about it. .Net will not conquer anything else. It is designed to defend Windows as a platform and not to attack.
Might I ask, whats so special about ASP.NET? There are other web/program languages out there… If compatablity is an issue. Besides Apple I dont know if apple would care too much, it depends on what the majority of Mac Developers are using and I would think ASP.NET would be used by a windows developer not a mac developer as much.
“Macs tend to not be replaced quite as often as their Windows PC counterparts. Because of this, a new PC is bought and sold for the same single individual many times over while the Mac user will have continued to use the same computer for far much longer. ”
… and exactly what kind of scientific survey did you run to find this out? Judging by my personal experience, I would imagine it is the other way around. Apple pushes a lot of really cheap, underpowered computers (iMac anyone?). Because they often cost more than a powerful x86 system, people make the stupid assumption that they are better. Over the years, many of my relatives have fallen for Mac and actually have gone and bought these underpowered machines. However, after a while, they put these systems in the closet and go out and buy either a real Mac or a x86 system. Regardless, it is more often the Mac marketshare that is being artificially inflated rather than the x86 marketshare.
>But if you want to use portable applications you want to use a portable software platform.
In the real-life industry it does NOT always work that way!
In my case, my company was doing ASP development for living and we had this customer who WANTED to use this particular graphics design company who they only had Macs! As you can understand, the Mac people could not run our scripts in order to view our webpages we created and design the appropriate graphics.
It is not about “deciding” to use “portable” software platforms. Sometimes this is not in your hands and in these cases, you are screwed if your code doesn’t run everywhere (for one reason or another). This is true for both web code and database code. For real application code is not as important.
Just make .net available…to take a page from Bill’s playbook: Embrace and Extend baby!!! The goal is to support it well enough that people can work with it on APPLE’S hardware! without haveing to choose MS or Apple simply to connect Access databases or simple office programs. That also keeps MS honest and thwarts some of MS grander schemes of world domination. Remember too, it opens Apple up to a lot of VB bindings in proprietary software that keep people locked into MS solutions. Using many of today’s plant and financial integration software packages you can’t just rip out MS servers because they control machine tools or electronic “canned” systems. But if Apple supports .net at least you can “talk” to the MS solutions and keep your “core business” out of MS hands!!!
Just make .net available…to take a page from Bill’s playbook: Embrace and Extend baby!!! The goal is to support it well enough that people can work with it on APPLE’S hardware! without haveing to choose MS or Apple simply to connect Access databases or simple office programs. That also keeps MS honest and thwarts some of MS grander schemes of world domination. Remember too, it opens Apple up to a lot of VB bindings in proprietary software that keep people locked into MS solutions. Using many of today’s plant and financial integration software packages you can’t just rip out MS servers because they control machine tools or electronic “canned” systems. But if Apple supports .net at least you can “talk” to the MS solutions and keep your “core business” out of MS hands!!!
While you make a few points, I’m not convinced Microsoft wants to see .NET used in any other platform outside Windows. It’s Windows or nothing for Microsoft, at least from my observation all these years.
> In my case, my company was doing ASP development for …
Ok, I understand this problem. However, situations like these are probably a small percent of the web development industry in general. There are cases where some application _has_ to talk with another one that runs on a different platform, we all know how the requirements and decisions are made in a real life case. Now you can do this with Web Services. Problem partially solved. If more than this sort of interop is necessary than a custom solution is probably applicable with tailored API and not using a framework.
This is my oppinion and I can be corrected.
Awww, I guess that people are going to be forced to have a choice between Java and Mono. What a terrible thing!
“Others will claim that C# and .NET is not important, but these people will probably be non-Windows developers”
I’d say people who say C# and .NET are very important are C#/.NET only developers. No serious programmer I know thinks .NET is that great. I bought a C# book and actually was disapointed. When I went from C++/Visual Basic 6 to Cocoa/Objective-C it was easy and MUCH much easier to develop easy to advanced applications. Looking at C# after learning Cocoa I couldn’t see any huge advantage of using it.
I talked to my teachers who meet recently with many representatives from several major companies and they said the reps they meet with had the impression .NET was a bad thing overall.
to tag along with her, there are a lot of MS windows machines in “black box” type applications running phone systems, machine tools, etc. Because they will all have VB or .net installed and usually front ends written in VB or .net, having .net give the apple servers easy access to get data OUT of the MS system.
I’ve worked in manufacturing and things move VERY slowly…VB is finally big after like 10 years…expect it to hang around for at least another 5 in machines or systems too expensive to replace. True, you could hack Perl scripts together to pick out the data files from your tools, but why when you can just install .net on the tool and use standard calls to access it!
Note: This is exactly the problem java is having now. It’s gotten hard to make “write-once, run-anywhere” software, but in implementation, it’s more of a “write java program on computer A” and “write java program on computer B”; make them talk. The two programs probably won’t run on the opposite machine, but you can at least use 1 tool/language to write them both and save time that way!
.Net support can’t hurt Apple. Indeed, if it ever becomes the standard on Windows, Apple’s going to be in a world of hurt if there’s no way to use .Net on Apple platforms. Think in terms of porting – are you going to rewrite the whole damn thing for 2% of the market?
With Linux and Mono, at least you wouldn’t need to do a total rewrite (if you were intelligent enough to keep OS-specific stuff out of the main code). If you’re looking for a UNIX-like platform, Linux makes a pretty damned good substitute to MacOS X. It’s something Apple should be concerned about.
Not porting C# to MacOS X because you think Java is better is like not porting C++ to Linux because I think Scheme is ever so much more efficient. Intentionally limiting your developers is NOT a good business practice, and WILL bite you in the ass if you’re unlucky.
-Erwos
Everyone knows that Windows will always dominate the industry as far as market share is concerned. Their figures comprise of every PC purchased with Windows, every purchase of a box set of Windows software. The same is true however for OS X, not to the same degree due to not as many systems being sold. Both owe some of their install base to Linux etc though, Yellow Dog linux is installed on most Macintosh boxes I have encountered in a while, and about half of the PC’s I come across have Linux installed also. Market share is hardly valid, nor are the google articles on the subject due to many browsers masking themselves as IE for compatibility reasons.
Its a moot point, use whatever you want… personally, every box I own has Linux installed, none were purchased with Linux installed though. I have 2 PPC’s, an ultraSPARC, and 3 PC’s. Maybe I am a rarity, but I do believe that all of my computers are adding to the market share of the operating systems I purchased them with.
I don’t get why Market Share always comes up when Mac or Windows or Linux is discussed as a whole, or when advocacy is discussed.
Apple will probably use Mono when Longhorn gets a large enough user base to warrent it. When Longhorn is released, .NET will become alot more popular. The entire OS will be written in managed .NET code, so its usage will far out weigh Java based on that fact alone. Its inevitable that .NET will become popular because anything that Microsoft does is widely accepted in the industry at large simply because Microsoft did it.
If Apple doesn’t support .NET, their users will suffer, on the other hand, if they just use Mono, they won’t even have to dedicate much in the way of man hours to the task. It will be simular to their Samba inclusion. They don’t really want it their, they don’t really do much to help the project, but they market the crap outta it to attract Windows users.
As long as Apple continues to tap the Open Source community, they will have access to projects that implement anything you could possibly need. Thats the best part about the community, someone somewhere is doing exactly what you think should be done, and you don’t even know it most of the time.
>> .Net support can’t hurt Apple.
Well, theoretically, it could. Let’s say Apple ports .NET to Mac OS X. They will do a good enough implementation, and the .NET software will run OK on the Mac, but still not as good as on Windows, since MS made it for Windows in the first place, etc.
So, developers start writing apps only in .NET, since they will be compatible everywhere, no need for Objective-C, since that only works on Mac OS X. So as a result, all software for the Mac will be just “good enough” (.NET) rather than Great (Cocoa etc).
Obviously, this doesn’t have to happen, and things might be different. But it sure as hell CAN POTENTIALLY hurt Apple, depending on how its done.
..your example is too lame. A Mac shop couldn’t run your ASP? They couldn’t buy/borrow one machine to install your scripts to do development against? And for this scenario Apple needs to be careful and support .NET?
Naww. Apple absolutely won’t do it. I can guarantee it, and here’s why: Apple doesn’t want to compete with the Dell’s and IBM’s of the world, and they’ll do a bang-up job of supporting whatever Microsoft throws out into the marketplace.
There are tons of great web development platforms that will run just fine in OS X. Apple doesn’t need MS, at least in the scenario you propose.
I’d rather pin my hopes that by the time IBM releases generation 2 or 3 of their G5s, the prices and performance will be more aligned with the rest of the marketplace. Apple still needs the cheaper, headless base unit to capture marketshare. Without that, they’re gonna have to rely on iPods.
Have you run a JAVA application on OSX recently? It is absolutly fantastic. It has the best desktop implimentation. Why? … because Apple is putting their tears and blood into JAVA, as if their very life depended on it! They are doing the right thing. .NET is for windows only. It is for applications that will run on various versions of WINDOWS running on different harware platforms.
Don’t you see that open standards of HTML, JAVA, LDAP, XML are threats to MS? JAVA is as must a worry to MS as LINUX. That is why they are trying to distract developers from it. BTW, I think Apple should buy REALbasic! They need a Visual Basic like language for newbee programmers.
So you want apple to support .NET because your company do ASP.
or ASP.net
If your company made the wrong decision in basing your web application on a NON OPEN solution it is your problem.
Hell, Mono probably already compiles on MacOS X with GTK.
I think Apple should focus on promoting Objective C and Cocoa, perhaps lending a hand to GNUStep’s efforts.
MacOS X shows than NeXTs UI layer and class library are as good as ever, with a built-in IDE that is really pretty damn good.
Their adoption of Konqueror, instead of licensing the IE rendering engine (which surely must have been an option), shows that a vendors overwhelming marketshare in a given area does not predispose Apple to adopting that vendors product.
Supporting .NET is not the same as supporting Java at all. Java essentially provides the entire environment, from GUI rendering code to the VM to the language specification, and it is all available publically.
You have to license the Java trademarks and pass conformance testing if you want to market your modifications to the technology as ‘Java’, but this is a comparitively passive involvement by Sun.
With .NET only the language specification and a minimal class library is available publically.
Entering into licensing agreements for Windows Forms etc. when this is being phased out in Longhorn for what is sure to be an entirely incompatible API along with MS proprietary extensions like WinFS, tied to their patented XML schemas, and requiring DirectX etc. for GUI widget performance, just make .NET a quagmire that i’m sure Apple would rather not wade into.
If I was Apple I would simply wait until Mono matures, or if they see significant pressure from customers, contribute resource toward improving Mono.
A Microsoft-directed, Apple-only implementation would only put Apple at a disadvantage, no matter which way the .NET cookie crumbles.
“Well, theoretically, it could.”
Yes, and I could come up with conspiracy theories about how SCO is secretly working with the Chinese government to undermine Linux adoption in the US so they can plant backdoors in Windows, since they’ve bribed Bill Gates with control of Taiwan after they take it over.
In other words, just because you can think of a scenario doesn’t make it plausible or likely. Apple is excellent cover for Microsoft’s anti-trust issues, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before they allow Apple to bankrupt itself. Apple is not really competition for Microsoft at this point. Linux is. Ergo, allowing Apple to live and prosper (within limits) while trying to kill Linux is going to be their course of action. Everything that’s leaked out of Microsoft indicates this.
In particular, your scenario is leaving out the fact that Microsoft’s ports to Macs are generally quite good (IE and Office come to mind). If they wanted to kill the Mac dead, they’d just cut off Office support and cite revenue issues. Doing it insidiously through C# is both slow and unreliable.
Put it like this: do you think C# support is more likely to hurt Apple than not having it?
-Erwos
“It is for applications that will run on various versions of WINDOWS running on different harware platforms. ”
Hint: search for Mono and GnuStep. Educate thyself.
-Erwos
The language was outdated when SUN created it (no properties, no operator overloading, etc). The original conception was a new architecture with new microprocessor. This concption was failed, java processors are dead. Some company use it to client and server side of the net-oriented applications, but on the client side the FLASH more successful. The server side is more interesting question: some big company use it, but the most of websites based on PHP, Perl or ASP.
At desktop side the Java is totally unuseable. Big, slow, every java application start a new virtual machine, and the swing is a stupid joke: very slow and look ugly.
I don’t see any chance to java in the future…
I’m on a MAC as well. My current client is using ASP. I have no problem at all working with it. Coded it in Dreamweaver and uploaded via Dreamweaver (Check in/Check out) to their server. Test it. Even though I don’t like ASP it works for me. I don’t see where the problem is.
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http://www.sideliners.ca
If Apple included a .NET runtime with Mac OS X, software companys like Adobe and Macromedia would write .NET versions of their software because they would run on both platforms. Mac OS X would never be able to run .NET applications as well as Windows, so it would be extremely stupid for Apple to include a .NET runtime, as long as there’s still enough “native” software available.
Java is a different thing. Apple can manage to have a Java environment that’s as good as on Windows, because Java isn’t developed by Microsoft.
IMHO, Apple should go with Mono. Mono is going to play main role into GTK# and Gnome desktop into at least the Linux world, and a Darwin port will be planned as for current PDA ports.
Rotor is good but it’s unsupported and can’t be easilu changed because of his kinda stupid license (thanks Microsoft), and simply implements the strict Ecma standard CLI and C# specifications. No *.Windows.* or *.Microsoft.* stuff there.
Just my 2 cents,
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SKApretto n.71
.NoT err .NET is just a marketing stunt, why investing so much on a young tecnology from the worst software produce ever?
Parrot (from perl) looks way more interesting and perl and python are around from MUCH more time, same goes for TAO/AmigaDE.
I don’t see the reason in running for a tainted system with other M$ lock-ins.
Apple pushes a lot of really cheap, underpowered computers (iMac anyone?).
Underpowered? What do you mean exactly? What does an everage user, leaving game pros aside, do with his or her x86 powerhouse_ Here at work I have one of those powerful PCs and I rarely (if ever) need the processing power it is capable of. As a matter of fact it happens when some brain-dead application utilizes too much CPU time (cleaning windows registry or crap like that) – you can actually tell by the anoying sound of the fan spining faster to cool off the heat generated by the ridiculous GHz-centric architecture…
I could do with a 14.7% or whatever slower, cooler running, Gsomething quite nicely!!
As for other enterprise users – blinking the cursor in Word is handeled by Mac as affectively as by any top-notch x86 machine. And it looks cooler too.
You’ve got some points Eugenia. BUT, I don’t think there’s a serious plan for .NET in MacOS just yet.
It’s a long way to go before .NET gets that big and supporting it now in other platforms only feeds it. I don’t think Apple wants this. The day .NET already is here in big scale it isn’t too late for Apple to implement support. As you said yourself, it wouldn’t be that hard using mono.
“It is for applications that will run on various versions of WINDOWS running on different harware platforms. ”
Hint: search for Mono and GnuStep. Educate thyself.
-Erwos
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Have you actually tried using those tools? Have you actually tried porting a Cocoa app to windows using GNUStep?
Reason I’m asking is ‘cos I’m curious to know how you found the experience
At desktop side the Java is totally unuseable. Big, slow, every java application start a new virtual machine, and the swing is a stupid joke: very slow and look ugly.
I don’t see any chance to java in the future…
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We’re talking about Macs here. If you’ve used Java on OS X, you’ll know that these are non-issues. Java is alive and kicking, especially on OS X desktops.
Mono on the other hand, does compile on OS X. But the last time I checked, the JIT didn’t work so you were stuck with the interpreter. And people were complaining that Java was slow….
When Mono matures, is there a reason Apple couldn’t offer the option to work with C# in Xcode, just as developers can work with Java?
It might take some extra work, maybe a lot fo extra work… but it’d give them one more thing to brag about in terms of possibilities for programmers. Certainly any .NET programmers would love to know that the back-ends they’ve written for their Windows (or other OSes, if Mono can make any progress with Windows.Forms) programs can be given a Cocoa front-end.
And of course, Mono as a proven component in web servers would help Apple win over the Enterprise market. “Move to an Xserve-based environment and continue to leverage your existing ASP.NET code while having the option to use our industrial-strength J2EE offerings.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if MS are already working on .NET for OS X. If future versions of Office are written for the .NET framework, it’d be very useful for them to have .NET available on OS X. That’d allow them to share code between the Windows and OS X version, saving them money.
It is incredible this sort of misinformation.
Apple has WebObjects which is better than ASP and JSP.
Five years ago I programmed on WebObjects on windows NT.
Infact OpenStep was very portable.
Then Steve Jobs decided to throw away portability and market domination.
Please inform better before pushing .net or saying that Apple should support jsp or php because it has no web solution.
I could see Apples Xservers playing “poor boy” to IBM’s AS400 lines
lol!! do you even know what an iSeries AS400 is? it sure as hell isnt anything remotly like or close to an xserve.
“What if I want to run a web application I wrote on ASP.NET on these nicely looking XServes? The point of the matter is, Apple is now into workstation/server market with the Unix-based Mac OS X, so it makes sense to support as many such technologies as possible.”
What if I want to run a webapp I wrote on ASP.NET on HPUX,AIX,SPARC etc?
See what I mean? This is not a valid argument IMHO.
You also forgot Mobile Phones, where JAVA is currently very much alive and probably the best way of getting your app onto the maximum number of devices. Even MS based ones.
The problem with .NET is that while the base libraries have been standardised the important ones (GUI, windows.forms, and database access, ADO.NET) haven’t. So if Apple tries to clone them, and it would have to for any real level of cross compatibility, it could get hammered by Microsofts lawyers.
Being able to use C# in XCode might be a nice option, but without windows.forms and ADO.NET it’s use will be limited
“Latest statistics show Apple below 2% of global desktop usage”
When I hear comments like this I want to screm. The context you are using it suggests that Apple’s marketshare equates to two percent of all computers being used. ”
No, that is what statistics and polls get you its not just figured by annual sales. They pick an area and they do surveys.
” Macs tend to not be replaced quite as often as their Windows PC counterparts. Because of this, a new PC is bought and sold for the same single individual many times over while the Mac user will have continued to use the same computer for far much longer. ”
From a personal standpoint I find this statement inaccurate. My 9600 I have had for years still is in use and works quite well, but my iBook, died after 2 years, my G4 tower after a year and a half and my new TiBook keeps developing little problems and Apple cant seem to fix it. From my standpoint this is the last Mac I will buy.
” I know this is off topic, but it needed to be said lest an even greater number of consumers be mislead by the figure and be hesitant to upgrade to a Mac and thus make this misapropriate of facts a self fullfilled prophecy. ”
I want mislead and i took your post as someone needing to vent, which is okay sometimes I need to vent to when I hear something utterly stupid and ridiculous, not refering to your post but to some articles.
I think the best estimation of installed base for Apple (and Linux) is Google’s zeitgeist:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist_nov03.html
This is a measurement of OSes used to search on Google.
This gives apple a 3% share, and Linux 1%.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-980319.html
I made the point that Apple is in an API backwater, and though their design skills are far above the average (Mac OS X is a GOOD OS, and their hardware design is cool and top notch), they still must contend with the fact that developers aren’t going to bother with an API that accounts for 2% of the market.
Tapping into .NET offers them the chance to allow Windows applications to work OUT OF THE BOX on the Mac (no more emulation). It’s a golden opportunity, if only Apple grabs the hanging fruit from the Microsoft tree (which is an extremely twisted analogy, but so be it).
I certainly hope they do, or at least that the mono port improves to the point where it’s truly viable (it more or less works now, but it’s still flaky and there are some pretty significant bits missing). A cocoa binding i could use with c# would be <3, especially if it had XCode support and Interface Builder integration…
…more trolling.
If I had a nickel for every “I want feature X… coincidentally, Apple needs to add this feature or they’re DOOMED” post I’ve seen here, I’d be a rich man. But at least I’d hoped the editorials would remain above the level of trolling.
Why are the maintainers of this site so eager to push Zeta, for example, which has no modern functionality (except the ability to run BeOS apps from 1998) and yet criticize Apple for not supporting the latest flash-in-the-pan commercial programming language that even its creators don’t use for in-house development?
That aside, does anyone actually think that MS will release any of its important software in IL-friendly code? They can easily throw in a tiny block of “unsafe” code in each project just to impair portability.
ASP.Net is great, but given Mono and Rotor to start from it should be trivial to improve the Apache ASP module to the point where ASP.Net can be run on any Apache server. I’m looking forward to this, at least, because I’m pretty damn tired of PHP.
And the reason is simple: On one side, it is being pushed by MS, and on the other by Linux. What’s the best way to stay afloat? Support as many languages as possible.
This makes sure that an app written “for Linux” or “for Windows” will also run under OSX. As the whole world moves forward and starts using the new languages, Apple will NOT be left behind. It also opens up Macs as a market, and negates all arguments that Macs lack software.
MS will also be happier: MS makes a tidy sum selling Office to macs (don’t know the exact number), and the money will be sorely missed. Presumably, MS will start writing Office in .NET, and so if the same code-base can be used for Windows and Macs, then the costs go down drastically…. IE is also another potential application.
Meanwhile, IBM will want to help Apple too. As has been said, IBM aligns itself with everyone. Apple is a major customer of IBM’s chip making factories, and so if Apple needs a nudge from IBM, IBM will deliver.
The real question now becomes, which .NET implementation will Apple go for? Do they licence and port MS code or do they work on Mono? I can think of reasons to choose one or the other. My guess? They will licence MS code: It will make MS happier
The mobile phones java applets at this moment like the old 8-bit style games, like C64, ZX-Spectrum. This applications are very nice but IMHO not too important. The mobile device applications never will in the mainstream until the display and the keyboard of this devices are too small for daily work.
And on the other side M$ works hard on mobile .NET platform (without too big success at this moment).
Java and MacOS: It is true, but IMHO the MacOS and the Mac hardware always will only the small piece of desktop market. The most of desktop applications remain on X86/windows or maybe linux. If I decided to write a business application a first target is the windows, the second is the linux, and the last is the MacOS. It is in the “nice to have” category.
IMHO the biggest problem is not the applications, but when (or if) client side .NET will replace the java applets and the flash all operatitons system witch doesn’t support .NET will out of business. The .NET support not only technical problem, it is the key of future. Webmasters who are desgin Internet Explorer-only web pages never will care the MacOS or linux users.
What if I want to run a web application I wrote on ASP.NET on these nicely looking XServes?”
I agree with what others have said about this. We’ve had this situation for years. Currently within my organization, we have websites that were deployed with Active X controls, which obviously won’t work on a Mac. And for what reason? What was gained that couldn’t have been done with JavaScript?
Most all of these Microsoft sort of things are a bastardization of the internet standards. In my opinion, as much of the programming should be kept on the server as possible, which should transmit HTML or XML data accessible from any platform. (Another problem with the design is that it requires too much of the client. At my workplace, even Windows machines get blocked from websites as their Active X installations aren’t the same).
All of these efforts from Microsoft to tie the internet directly into Windows APIs, is part of the same old strategy to lock out everyone else, and require Windows use.
.Net is not an open standard that Apple can just implement. When you have been convicted of abusing a monopoly position, it shouldn’t be that everyone else is still required to reverse-engineer your technology, as Microsoft recently stated.
I think .Net ports are probably a good thing. .Net support is probably going to be more about interoperability with windows in workplace networks.
I still think that Apple should have a bigger market in corporate desktops and laptops. Most corporate users don’t need windows and the security benefits alone are massive. (how often does the head of the marketting dept, or finance, or the CEO get most of the viruses)
MS integration is still a major requirement and that will probably mean .Net integration at some point. I agree Apple should move sooner rather than later.
.Net isn’t a bad thing, I can’t think of many examples where a language just up and died because another more hyped language came along. Java was pretty hyped and it didn’t harm the major language of the time. (It might have eaten into niche languages a bit)
I hope that .Net will somewhat invigorate java to fix its flaws, especially in gui apps. Apple already has an SWT port I believe with Eclipse being ported. That is progress.
I doubt MS will license .Net it to apple cheaply enough (compared to what Mono would cost for example)
enough said, again, thanks Eugenia
I sure hope so; I’d love to be able to write C# apps that are portable between Windows and OS X.
– chrish
.. it would never be a complete solution. It would be foolish to think that you could write an entire program in C# and magically run it on a Mac with no problems. Microsoft would never, ever open up .NET enough to allow this and Apple would never port Cocoa to windows. At best, we’ll be able to write the “back end” of the application in C# and the GUI part in Objective-C just like you can now with C++/Cocoa. IMO this is the best solution anyway because it is the best way to balance integration and portability.
Yes, you’d have to write at least two different GUI front-ends but you can blame Microsoft and Apple for that. It’s the nature of proprietary APIs; they aren’t interoperable! All the managed code in the world isn’t going to change that.
It seems like people are hoping that C#/Java are going to be the magic bullet that’s going to change all the cross-platform inconsistencies that we have today, but I don’t think it’ll ever happen.. not on proprietary platforms anyway.
As a regular viewer of OSNews I have noticed that OSNews touts how wonderful .NET is constantly. .Net and Linux.. The contributors who run OSNews just love .Net and Linux… Whats the deal guys? Are you biased? No offense or anything.. I have just noticed alot of this.. Alot of “My opinion is better than yours” No offense or anything and I’m not looking for a fight or to bash people.. Just a comment to an article… No need for violence..
“I think Apple should buy REALbasic! They need a Visual Basic like language for newbee programmers.”
Haven’t they ticked this box with Applescript Studio and Python?
Microsoft will write more and more of Office in .Net so a port to Mac is a interesting possibility. This also would reduce the differences between Office in Windows and in Mac and would give them power ower Apple.
I can’t see why someone would pay a premium price to run apps that can be run on an integrated Longhorn PC at a far lower price point with better performance. Apple isn’t the most profitable firm these days but they do have good technology and are soon to be debt free. Since most of their users are pro’s it might be more logical for them to merge with IBM.
Right now the the trend is moving away from Microsoft, and closer to open-source and standards-based systems. Sure Java is not open-source but it is a standard that you can use to run apps anywhere.
One of the big plus I saw myself (being a windows developer) to “try my hands” on Mac OS X was exactly that: I could go try Java, JSP, PHP, Perl, Apache, mySQL, and all those wonderful technologies (from a developer’s viewpoint). I see the Mac more as a “friendly version” of UNIX, as opposed to a “Cool GUI OS”, in other words, I (like many others) are now being lured to the Mac platform not because it has a cool interface and a nice API, but rather because it is a great platform that can provide me both the easy of use of Macs (and to some extend, windows) with the power of Unix, and the flexibility that technologies like Java, PHP, Apache and mySQL provide. I do *not* intende on writing a single Mac-specific application, but rather ones that I can easily take an run in Macs, Linux, Unix variants, and yes, even M$.
>Might I ask, whats so special about ASP.NET? There are >other web/program languages out there… If compatablity >is an issue. Besides Apple I dont know if apple would >care too much, it depends on what the majority of Mac >Developers are using and I would think ASP.NET would be >used by a windows developer not a mac developer as much.
Exactly!Why such a big noise about .NET , I don’t understand..NET techs are not portable,therefore my “nice webapp” will be written in something portable (did I just said Java?).From .NET I like only the name,thats it.
Not true: google for YellowBox, Cocoa (well, the OpenStep APIs) on Windows NT
Anybody who refuses to see that just because they are biased against Microsoft is in for a big surprise in a few years. If you think that I am a microsoft only developer, think again: I currently work with python and php and I am writing a linux kernel extension in c.
But I really like .NET. It is the first real chance to get a fast and yet architecture independent software infrastructure, and that is really *very* important since the x86 isa seems to finally show its age. In a few years there will be three or more important architectures: x86-64 from amd, power from IBM and (if it survives) itanium from intel. Gentoo users might be willing to recompile each software when installing it, but for normal users this is simply not an option.
Non VM based compiler languages will therefore only be used for extremely low level applications such as drivers in a few years, so there are only three VM architectures for modern programming languages:
One is java, but it is not feasible to use it for many application such as graphics and numerical computing since it lacks value types. Many people have explained again and again why value types are such a big deal, so I will not do so again. Another problem of the Java VM is that it does not have good support for functional languages (no tailcall) and no support for low level languages (no real pointers).
The second big VM architecture is .NET. With the inclusion of generics in .Net 2.0 it is almost perfect (note that I am talking about the VM, not the C# language). It has good support for numerical stuff (value types, operator overloading), a very intelligent generics system, good support for functional languages (tailcall etc.), and even good support for low level languages such as c (real pointers in unsafe mode). You should be able to get better performance than C++ when the VM matures, since you can adapt the code perfectly to the underlying architecture during JIT-Compiling.
The third candidate are the various efforts to get good performance out of python, ruby. perl and other highly dynamic languages. If somebody manages to get python reasonably fast, it will have a huge impact since python is a very nice language.
To get back on topic: it would be stupid for apple not to support .NET. They can use all the work of the mono project and just have to add some cocoa or carbon bindings. .NET has enough reflection capabilities to make this relatively easy.
MONO is based on the public ISO standards for C# and the CLI. this crap about open standards is moot when JAVA became it’s own standards body instead of releasing it to the governing standards organization. SUn lost my loyalty ages ago.
Watch and see. I don’t care if you like MS or not most windows developers I know are moving tward .NET like it or not. Most non windows developers I know are scared and attempting to dismiss .NET
I am not sure how Apple would feel about porting Mono but I for one would purchase a mac then. I LOVE mac hardware. LOVE OS X but I want to have applications to run.
Your looking at this from the low level perspective of a developer using C# or ASP.NET. I’m a Technical Architect and have designed very large J2EE (Websphere, Weblogic and other) architectures as well as a very large distributed .NET architecture. For anything involving high numbers of transactions .NET is not even on the radar screen. This is because .NET is far from mature as a distrbuted architecture application server platform but also because the underlying OS is not considered stable or scalable enough (yes I include Windows server 2003) compared to Unix. Ask any bank, stock exchange, credit card company etc. if they use .NET and they will laugh in your face. They ae not even considering it at this point. Now I make my money either way but I’ve done both and J2EE on Unix just blows .NET/Windows OS away. BTW you are as one poster already said misunderstanding the 2% figure for Mac usage.
>What if I want to run a web application I wrote on ASP.NET on these nicely looking XServes?
Use Virtual PC 7.0 coming in March! 🙂
Does .NET run older MS OSes? It seems to me that alot of people are still running older machines with older OSes. What will be the true user base if it only runs on new OSes?
I think that you could have argued all of the points, but when you throw in that market share comment, it shows that you probably haven’t looked quite as far as you should into that topic.
I certainly hope that Macs stay on the desktop, on the server side, and not in my local grocery store.
Google reports that out of all the OS’ in page views, 3% belongs to the MacOS
Other than that, embracing more of Java on the Mac would be best. They should integrate more of Java, and improve on what they have.
Google reports that out of all the OS’ in page views, 3% belongs to the MacOS
I don’t think this figure has any signification. I know this is not a proof, but in the companies I have contact with (working in Publishing and/or Printing) most computers are Macs (about 90%), and only 5 to 20% of the employees have Internet access, usually behind a proxy. They use their access to send and receive mail, and few of them really surf the Internet, and they rarely have something to see on Google (they have subscriptions to press agencies, they search image banks, that’s all). So, a professional image bank site could report that out of all the OS’ in page view, 98% belongs to MacOS!
Mablatter! – Most .NET apps written today are probably in-house stuff in contrast to shrink-wrapped stuff. That will change. I’m assuming that XP SP 2 will include the .NET runtime and if you look at the longhorn roadmap ther’s basically no getting around using .NET in the future for windows development. I still don’t know how people that write say games in c or c++ fit into this picture. I hear MS is revamping a non-managed api for these people, but haven’t read much about it.
tly – You seem to be confused about Mono. Mono isn’t about some bridge to the windows world. If you ask Miguel De Icaza, he’ll tell you that even if MS started playing games and suing people left and right for implementing non-ECMA parts of .NET he still considers the ECMA stuff a great development environment for Gnome. Personally I find their wine-implementation of SWF to be somewhat hideous.
As far as Apple i concerned, the Mono JIT engine is now running on PPC, if not very well. Up until recently, there really wasn’t that much work being done on PPC, but that is changing with Novell’s acquistion of Ximian. I hear they just hired another JIT guy. That said, I don’t know why Apple would invest any resources into helping out Mono until they achieve 1.0 status. Having a continually shrinking market percentage also means a continually shrinking developer base. Yeah, you’ve got fink all the nice unix apps out there, but how many Mac people are using fink? Mac people seem so concerned with aesthetics that I see them despising something that is running on top of X(except for the linux converts). It sure can’t hurt to have more options out there for developers. I’m a programmer, and don’t see myself using objective-c anywhere in the near future when its basically just mac developers and maybe the OpenStep people using it.
Apple has no obligation to support .NET, or anything else.
If they have one obligation, it is to provide a platform that attracts developers.
Apple has as much an obligation to support .NET as they do to support ColdFusion.
If Microsoft deems to use .NET in MS Office, and they deem to support that version of Office on OSX, Microsoft will port their .NET framework. If Microsoft then decides open that runtime up for general uses by generic developers, bully for them.
Anybody who wants to write cross platform software will immediately dismiss .NET and MS Frameworks for obvious reasons. Some are quite happy supporting only Windows users.
I note that there is no argument that MS must implement a Cocoa Framework or port Aqua and the Finder to Windows. How come? Why not? “We don’t care. We’re Microsoft, and we don’t have to”?
Should Sun implement their own .NET for Solaris as well as Apple?
Apple chose to implement Java for its own reasons, no doubt its popularity is part of it. But Java is also VASTLY more open than “real” .NET will ever be. By “real” .NET, I mean beyond the runtime and C# syntax that’s “standard” already. The parts that make developers want to use .NET.
Some may enjoy C# syntax, some may like the concept of the CLR. But what drives developers to .NET is the swath of components and support that MS has put behind it. It’s far more than simply C#.
The .NET community has already fragmented. It fragemented almost immediately. Mono != .NET as .NET developers see it. Java has been around a long time, with several implementations, and managed to stay together as a platform far better.
Apple’s would be a 3rd, and different, implementation. So, now you have 3 versions of a platform with LCD compatability.
Yeah, that’ll help.
Jobs said somewhere that they’ll let the open-source community handle any kind of .NET implemention of OSX for the time being. I wouldn’t be surprised if they invested some kind of resources into after a 1.0 release.
I guess you didn’t realize that Mono has a somewhat working JIT for PPC already. I don’t know where you get this 3rd implementation stuff. I doubt Apple would start their own implementation when there is already so much work done by Mono.
The point is that your not going to attract developers by having everything written in Objective-c. That’s just reality. .NET/mono/whatever will probably never be as binary crossplatform as java, but that’s not the point. Alot of it will be, and to write a gui-frontend is pretty trivial when you consider everything else.
As has been repeated time and time again, market share is a figure generated by rterly or anual sales figures. It doesn’t translate to the more accurate statistic “installed base (which is the context you used in this instance)
Macs tend to not be replaced quite as often as their Windows PC counterparts. Because of this, a new PC is bought and sold for the same single individual many times over while the Mac user will have continued to use the same computer for far much longer.
I know this is off topic, but it needed to be said lest an even greater number of consumers be mislead by the figure and be hesitant to upgrade to a Mac and thus make this misapropriate of facts a self fullfilled prophecy.
I think it is relevant since we are talking about the future of Apple. Apple’s 2002-2003 global sales were just 3.2%, down .2% from the year before. Overall, the PC sector grew 10.8% for the same time period.
By Apple’s own admission, the installed base of OSX users is only 10 million. Which is less than 3 million more units than the number of Windows XP based PCs that Dell sold for the 4Q 2003.
What this means is that Apple and it’s user’s cannot be arrogant when it comes to Apple’s future. Apple’s future is not certain. Apple needs to take the blinders off, look at their situation and take technologies like .Net seriously.
At one point Apple could have open sourced Cocoa and delt a big blow to Microsoft, but it’s too late now. Apple needs to play follow the leader.
http://idc.com/getdoc.jhtml?containerId=pr2004_01_13_185937
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/06macosx.html
At one point Apple could have open sourced Cocoa and delt a big blow to Microsoft, but it’s too late now. Apple needs to play follow the leader.
Actually, Jobs could’ve dealt a deathblow to MS back in the 80’s by licensing NextStep OS to IBM. IBM wanted it bad but Jobs blew the deal. Jobs seemed to fall for hiw own “reality distortion field” and thought that NextStep would be something.
“Apple needs to take the blinders off, look at their situation and take technologies like .Net seriously.”
It’ll be years before we see commercial apps being developed with .Net. Even with Longhorn in full entrenchment (say a year after its release, which we’ll be optimistic about and say 2006), I bet most commercial apps will not be .Net apps.
There are already three attempts to get .Net on the Mac (Mono, Portable .Net, and ROTOR). They are not even close to a point where Apple should consider putting resources into them.
So why should Mac developers be concerned about .Net? I’m concerned about Carbon and Cocoa, Java, Perl, Python, AppleScript.
Let’s put the marketshare issue aside; the issue is: does the Mac have a healthy developer community? Certainly, it could be bigger, but it has been very healthy and growing since OS X was released. Intuit brought back QuickBooks, enterprise apps like Sybase and Oracle have moved onto OS X, there are more developer tools now, the best media apps are on the Mac, the Mac community has gained the leverage of the OSS community that appreciate a polished commercial system. Yes, it could be better, but despite people incessently pointing to marketshare, I haven’t seen applications disappearing, I’ve seen them increasing.
Why would I now start to encourage the development of applications on a non-native platform. I’d rather continue to encourage development on native platforms. (That means you, AutoDesk!)
..they just wanna sell more iPods.
Eugenia got it right. .net is quite real. I have experience with it and I can easily say that it is not going anywhere and it is here to stay with us. Mostly Microsoft bashers and some idiots are going to argue against it, because they don’t know what they are talking about.
Java is strong, you can do with Java. But when you have so many developers which develops for this platform, you certainly would like to make use of it. Apple didn’t support java because it fell in love with it. They supported it cause there are many developers for it. Idiots forget the fact that Apple is a company. They don’t use the same logic idiots use, like Microsoft is evil etc… They simply try to make money. For that reason, Eugenia is definitely right on the target with her comments here.
Hmmmm, am I just missing the hole idea of .NET or did a bunch of you miss it?
Like Apple has had a .NET like framework since the time Jobs came back with his Next system.
Like wouldn’t WebObjects be .NET ???
It was based on C and now it’s based on Java so what is all this about???
I guess nobody has visited Apple’s site recently. 😉
Why does practically every article about .NET only talk about C# and not VB.NET? They’re the same freaking thing now, it’s just a matter of preference. Personally I like case insensitivity, not having to mark the ends of lines, and not having to use those damn brackets. There’s more to .NET than C#, people, and quit the discrimination against VB.NET until you’ve tried it. VB.NET <> VB.
There are no features of .NET that make it more compelling that Java or PHP. There are situations where .NET and ASP.NET specifically are as compelling, but not more so that its competition. Java is used almost exclusively in the enterprise, and PHP is used on smaller sites throughout the internet. Who uses .NET? Windows shops with Windows servers. I’ve worked at several large Fortune 500 companies, and NONE of them would ever consider using Microsoft servers for anything but an Exchange server. You have no trouble finding Java developers, and Java servers are stable, performant, and cross-platform.
Before coming up with such a ludicrious opinion you should have at least consulted this list:
http://101.manageability.org
.NET = ActiveX
worthless and virus friendly
.net does not equal or have anything to do with ActiveX. ActiveX is a marketing name for COM and .net is about getting moving away from COM.
.net isn’t bad its just not mature yet.
It is a very powerfull development platform and MS is betting the bank on it.
http://www.thinksecret.com/features/ximianosx.html
On OSX we have CARBON, COCOA and JAVA, who needs another development framework?
There are probably too many already.
Just let MS add yet another bloated layer to their operating system which has deposited enough layers of encrusted crud between programmer and hardware as it is.
snip…
“I’ve already read articles about .net support for IBM Big Iron servers [but I can’t remember off hand]. ”
A little birdy @ MS has told me that they already have working .NET implementations for a number of other platforms including the above sort of stuff.
Your article is interesting and it would be quite interesting to see Apple adopt .NET. Imagine the enourmous base of programmers Apple would have…
But, your article infers that C# is .NET the way Java is Java. That could not be further from the truth. C# is merely a language, one of many (including VB.NET, C++.NET,
Cobol.NET, Fortran.NET, etc. etc..) that TARGET the .NET Framework. C# is NOT .NET. C# is a language and does not have to be adopted with .NET.
This points out the fundamental flaw of Java (well, at least ONE of the fundamental flaws with Java): You have to program in Java to target the JVM, which limits your pool of talent.
Please don’t imply that you must use C# to do .NET. You absolutely DO NOT. In fact, if Apple chose to implement the .NET CLR, I could write Apple programs on my WinTel computer in VB.NET, or any other language.