May 94 - SFA Atlanta 1994
SFA Atlanta 1994
Adam Wildavsky, John MacVeign, and Mary Elaine
Califf
Please note that this report was compiled from the efforts of more than one conference
attendee. Opinions expressed herein are held by at least one, but not necessarily all of
the authors.
Atlanta was the place to be during the first week in March of this year as the SFA held
its fifth annual conference. The weather was not particularly good for most of the
week, but, between the early sessions, the afternoon sessions, the get-togethers
during meals, and the hack session, I didn't really notice the weather until Friday,
when it turned warm and sunny. While much of the software development world
wondered just how to start doing the "OOP" thing a group of both experienced
practitioners and enthusiastic newcomers gathered to exchange theoretical knowledge
and practical experience. The variety of object-related subjects this year shows that
the pervasive use of object technologies is gaining momentum. While last year's
conference was primarily focused on design and basic tools, this year's conference
shifted the emphasis towards the destination of all those tools: frameworks. This was a
true cross platform and cross framework conference (not one MacApp session!) but
most of the attendees had experience with MacApp and C++. This shared background
provided a context for more meaningful discussion and more facile communication than
I've seen at other conferences.
Monday
The weather was awful; it rained for days on end. It's just as well the hotel was
comfortable!
Novell
Joe Firmage of Novell gave the opening keynote address. Joe started out by explaining
Novell's business strategy past and present. I was surprised when this turned out to be
interesting. His point was that Novell has succeeded mainly by "Redirection." Initially
this redirection consisted of redirecting DOS File API calls so that they accessed
Netware file servers. Now one of Novell's plans is to redirect entire sets of native APIs
using something they call the "AppWare Foundation.
Joe is the VP of the AppWare systems group and his talk turned to (surprise)
AppWare. AppWare seems to aim to be a cross-platform everything development
environment. Its main building block is something called an ALM, an AppWare Loadable
Module. Today these are written in C and put together with Novell's "Visual
AppBuilder." There are two kinds of ALMs, functions and objects. Why are the
functions separate from the objects? Let's just say that AppWare is not as Object
Oriented as some might wish.
All ALMS communicate with one another via an "AppWare Bus." Later this year a
"Distributed AppWare Bus" is supposed to be available.
Novell sees the computing environment partitioned between GUI, Business Logic, and
Data Management. With the network portion of data management firmly in hand they
are trying to flesh out the rest of the partition by supporting data base access through
SQL and ODBC ALMs. The business logic partition is handled by providing not just ALMs
but an environment in which they can be quickly linked together. They have left the
GUI partition to the existing players by defining services which map to the native GUI.
Given the big push for OpenDoc throughout the rest of the week, it may seem odd that
Firmage did not spend any time discussing it. By concentrating their efforts on the
sweet spot in the middle of the graph between flexibility and ease of development,
Novell is concentrating on the problems their customers are most interested in
solving. While a founding member of CILabs, they are probably happy to leave the
more complicated "big picture" designs, like OpenDoc, to Apple and application
developers like WordPerfect. [Oh no! Five minutes after writing that sentence I heard
that Novell went and bought WordPerfect. Talk about dynamic linking!]
One of Joe's slides would later show up repeatedly, in similar guises from other
vendors. It showed a row of ALMs on the top, each with a connection to the AppWare
Bus in the middle, and the AppWare Bus lying on top of the AppWare Foundation below.
Presumably the native OS lies below the AppWare Foundation.
Apple's Tools Strategy
Ike Nassi, Vice President of Development Products at Apple stopped by to give a fairly
standard "Here's where Apple is headed this year" presentation. It is important to
point out that this was being given at SFACon, and not at Apple's own WWDC. Among the
information Ike gave us was that Apple is concentrating on increasing the market for
learning, publishing, and collaboration products. He also gave some details on two
major kinds of products that his group produces: core tools and frameworks. He wanted
to tell us that contrary to rumor Apple continues to invest in developer tools. MPW,
ToolServer, and Dylan were listed as core tools. IBM's SOM and DSOM are being
invested in as a dynamic linking solution. PowerPC development will, of course, be
emphasized and MPW will be available in a native PowerPC version. For the future
Apple intends to establish OODLs as a mainstream programming paradigm. In
particular, Dylan was described as "in use at Apple today". In the frameworks
department, MacApp has been reinstated as an Apple product. A new version of MacApp
is planned which will support AppleScript and AOCE. Future versions will support
OSA, OpenDoc containers, and will allow the embedding of OpenDoc parts. Meanwhile,
Bedrock, now in Apple's hands, has been renamed the "OpenDoc Parts Framework". It
retains its cross-platform abilities and will be seeded at the WWDC (yes, 1994).
Obviously OpenDoc was the big item being discussed this year. Ignore it at your peril:
Apple stated that it will be switching to OpenDoc parts for future delivery of OS
services to developers. Ike also told us we could AppleLink OPENDOC for a copy of the
OpenDoc Alpha CD.
While Mr. Nassi was a bit defensive he did not get quite the barrage of complaints that
many people expected to hear. During the Q&A period several people asked why various
new technologies were not part of ETO, but I didn't detect the level of discontent I had
expected. (Has it really been three years since any features were added to MacApp?)
No doubt this was partly due to the old "we're new here and we're going to fix things
right up" line. Perhaps, but after a few years of hearing that, people tend to just walk
away. Hopefully all the Apple people realized that their harshest critics are those who
most want Apple to succeed; the rest have already taken that walk.
One possible problem with Apple's developer relations is that they seem unsure as to
who is driving the Macintosh market. On the one had, Apple may be thinking that if
they sell a lot of machines we developers will be willing to pay a lot for their tools,
since we'd know there's a market for the resulting software. On the other hand, Apple
could decide that cheap tools will encourage the development of software which would
then drive the sale of more machines. Exactly which model Apple is following (if any)
is still not clear.
Microsoft's Object Strategy
Microsoft's James Plamondon was the third speaker, a last minute replacement for
Mark Ryland. As usual of late James tried to persuade us how wonderful our lives
would be if we would only develop for Windows. His main point regarding OLE was that
"It's shipping now" and that products that take advantage of it "Are shipping now." He
said this more than once.
James made some compelling points about Microsoft's developer support. To help
illustrate Microsoft's "developer friendliness" he brought CDs for everyone. Each CD
contained an OLE developer kit for Windows and an OLE beta for the Mac. Unfortunately