Can you comment on such tools as WebObjects, and how application server + application/web-service development tools compare to something like roll your own via Perl?
There's obviously going to be learning-time-cost-flexibility-power tradeoffs when evaluating, but the question I'm wondering: when is it worth more to do it yourself, and when is it worth more to use someone else's tools?
At my stage in my life, DIY is cheaper and easier. If I were running a for profit website with customers, privacy and security concerns, reliability concerns... is DIY still feasible for one person? For 10 programmers?
Is deploying a commercial product something to consider? When? What circumstances? Or are they complementary?
But the issue is at what point is a $700 investment in tools worth more than learning how to create all the tools necessary to achieve the same thing?
The price of the book is quite obviously a no brainer, compared to the price of WebObjects.
But if you're trying to write up a web store and an account/login system, with integration into a site that offers online on site information, how much is a good programmatic application server and a set of libraries and development tools, as opposed to writing them all up from scratch in Perl?
Quoted from http://www.apple.com/webobjects: WebObjects efficiently generates HTML, XML, or SMIL from reusable templates, which are mapped directly into the object model. By cleanly separating the presentation layer from your logic and data, you never have to worry about corrupting your database. WebObjects will even handle all your session management needs, without using cookies. Access data automatically Our patented Object-Relational Mapping engine lets you write all your business logic using objects. WebObjects will automatically fetch, cache and update the data for you from any JDBC 2 database or JNDI service -- you may never need to write another line of SQL.
Create applications rapidly WebObjects comes with a comprehensive suite of developer tools. One person can construct a prototype in seconds, or a team can manage a sophisticated e-commerce project. And when web pages aren't enough, WebObjects enables you to rapidly create full-featured, three-tier Java desktop applications, running on their own or in a browser.
Java CompatibleDeploy anywhere painlessly The WebObjects runtime is written entirely in Java, allowing you to deploy your application to virtually any J2EE server or use Apple's scalable Java application server. And with low-cost licensing and smart load-balancing, it's a snap to add more machines to scale your application as necessary.
And quoting the review on what the book, with Perl, allows you to do:
Virgin programmers, when they're through with Perl for Web Site Management, will find themselves able to make effective use of Perl programs to automate a plethora of tasks, including mass manipulation and modification of a site's files; server log analysis (using Perl's powerful regular expression facility); link checking (using the LWP module); and auto-generating an annotated site map from the tags in the site's HTML files. The latter part of the book introduces server-side web application programming using CGI (examples include coding a site Guestbook and integrating with the SWISH-E site search facility), along with more advanced lore like the CPAN code archive, Perl's object-oriented features, storing user data in DBM databases, and publishing modules for reuse by others. Along the way, the book teaches a respectable amount about UNIX, as well; the main text, as well as the many informative sidebars, contain concise and clear explanations of necessities like stdin/stdout redirection; chmod and file permissions; shell filename globbing; tab completion in bash; network troubleshooting with traceroute; and much more.
WebObjects is not a 'cookie cutter' website management and creation tool.
It's a tool to allow for the programmatic creation and manipulation of a website, with the capability to create standalone or connected Java apps and applets to boot.
Well, there's the thought that spending a week learning 'stuff' is a non value add activity.
At the end of the week, has the employee produced $700 worth of work? Or just consumed $700 worth of paycheck?
Whereas, with a tool, at the end of the week, $1400 was spent, but $700+ was produced because for 39 hours the employee was working on producing content?
In another analogy, is your time spent better that writing a new word processor, or is the boss's money better spent buying you Word?
It just recently occurred to me; why are people always rolling their own, instead of using production quality stuff?
Sure, some people can't afford a $700 package like WebObjects, but then, if you're worth $20 an hour, that's only 35 hours worth of time... or one week.
If you can get up in one hour what takes you one week 'learning from scratch'... as well as not having to write *or* maintain tools... isn't that money well spent?
Another question then; will this be a 'one user at a time' machine?
Because it may make more sense to have a fairly hefty tower + some terminal like device (iBook, iMac, eMac, etc), rather an end-all-be-all tower.
Meaning you take the iBook and log in as necessary to the tower (wireless natch!) to do your C++ compute intensive stuff while she gets the tower to do her JBuilder stuff.
Every tower comes with a dual head video card. The base card is a Radeon 7500 I believe, upwards to the GeForce4MX up to the GF4Ti. I don't think the Radeon will do you poorly at all.
Right, but you said "With the announced new graphics pipeline through OpenGL and it's requirement of 32 MB of video RAM I'm betting we'll see that met across the board."
What the Apple page says, bolding mine, "nVidia: GeForce2MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 or GeForce4MX. ATI: any AGP Radeon card. 32MB VRAM recommended for optimum performance."
So what you mean is "With the announced new graphics pipeline through OpenGL and it's recommended 32 MB of video RAM I'm betting we'll see that met across the board."
I'm not disagreeing, you won't see the full advantage of QE with only 16mb of VRAM, so I'm sure everything will get bumped up to 32mb, or more.
The CPUs, at 800MHz or higher, is no big thing. Really.
The current bus speeds, at 133MHz, is nearly 6-8 times slower than the the CPU. Some of that memory bandwidth is also being allocated the AGP, DMA transfers, firewire transfers, and just about anything else in the Apple mobo that uses the RAM. So the CPU is *starving* at the GHz level, especially at the dual CPU level.
Being force to wait 10 cycles while waiting for memory is bad.
On the PC side a CPU may be 2GHz now, but the memory is also quad pumped 133MHz as well. 2x the CPU but *4* times the memory bandwidth.
So yes Apple needs faster CPUs, but they need faster memory even more.
This still doesn't prevent a hybrid-electric diesel (HETDI?) design.
Keep the diesel engine running at a low rpm continuously (useful for highway runs), and even in the city, where it might have a lower rpm mode, to recharge the batteries.
But rely on the electric motors and regenerative braking for the stop and go, only shutting off the engine after a good amount of time. Instead of starting and stopping at every light, keep it running for a while (say 15 minutes), and if it doesn't get goosed, then shut down until the car enters a freeway situation.
Or better yet, have a switch/toggle between city and highway mode, and let the driver decide.
Since the Civic and Insight are gasolene hybrids, and a conventional Civic gets about ~30mpg -> ~50mpg, a TDI might get much better mileage with a hybrid electric system.
But in the meantime I'm considering the Civic because it gets more horsepower for only slightly less mileage.
Because one day it will be used in a car frame in which you will be sitting in, and will not only make the car more fuel efficient, due to weight, it will enable you to survive an accident you would not otherwise.
OS X iMac iMac2 iBook iPod PowerBook Handspring Newton Palm Pilot CrossPad ViaVoice Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty Spider-Man Lord of the Rings The Matrix The Matrix:Revolution VooDoo VooDoo2 GeForce GeFor ce3 GeForce4 Quake3 Doom3
Now, let's see if I can do better (I know I can't beat 13lb).
Apple Titanium: 6 pounds, 1280x854 15" screen 667MHz *and* DVI out. $2500
Apple 22" LCD: 25 pounds, 1600x1024 22" screen, DVI in. $2500
So yeah, you'll have to lug around 31 pounds to lan parties, but that's still lighter than a 17" monitor, and you get 6" of additional screen, cost you the same, get you less processor power, but more battery life, and nearly 3x the number of pixels.
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If you didn't ask for the features and you don't want the features, then what's the problem?
And why do you suppose 10.1.5 won't be supported? Because you just learned that Microsoft has dropped support for Windows 95 and Windows 98?
Can you comment on such tools as WebObjects, and how application server + application/web-service development tools compare to something like roll your own via Perl?
There's obviously going to be learning-time-cost-flexibility-power tradeoffs when evaluating, but the question I'm wondering: when is it worth more to do it yourself, and when is it worth more to use someone else's tools?
At my stage in my life, DIY is cheaper and easier. If I were running a for profit website with customers, privacy and security concerns, reliability concerns... is DIY still feasible for one person? For 10 programmers?
Is deploying a commercial product something to consider? When? What circumstances? Or are they complementary?
Your points are all valid, of course.
But the issue is at what point is a $700 investment in tools worth more than learning how to create all the tools necessary to achieve the same thing?
The price of the book is quite obviously a no brainer, compared to the price of WebObjects.
But if you're trying to write up a web store and an account/login system, with integration into a site that offers online on site information, how much is a good programmatic application server and a set of libraries and development tools, as opposed to writing them all up from scratch in Perl?
Do you know what WebObjects is?
Quoted from http://www.apple.com/webobjects:
WebObjects efficiently generates HTML, XML, or SMIL from reusable templates, which are mapped directly into the object model. By cleanly separating the presentation layer from your logic and data, you never have to worry about corrupting your database. WebObjects will even handle all your session management needs, without using cookies.
Access data automatically
Our patented Object-Relational Mapping engine lets you write all your business logic using objects. WebObjects will automatically fetch, cache and update the data for you from any JDBC 2 database or JNDI service -- you may never need to write another line of SQL.
Create applications rapidly
WebObjects comes with a comprehensive suite of developer tools. One person can construct a prototype in seconds, or a team can manage a sophisticated e-commerce project. And when web pages aren't enough, WebObjects enables you to rapidly create full-featured, three-tier Java desktop applications, running on their own or in a browser.
Java CompatibleDeploy anywhere painlessly
The WebObjects runtime is written entirely in Java, allowing you to deploy your application to virtually any J2EE server or use Apple's scalable Java application server. And with low-cost licensing and smart load-balancing, it's a snap to add more machines to scale your application as necessary.
And quoting the review on what the book, with Perl, allows you to do:
Virgin programmers, when they're through with Perl for Web Site Management, will find themselves able to make effective use of Perl programs to automate a plethora of tasks, including mass manipulation and modification of a site's files; server log analysis (using Perl's powerful regular expression facility); link checking (using the LWP module); and auto-generating an annotated site map from the tags in the site's HTML files. The latter part of the book introduces server-side web application programming using CGI (examples include coding a site Guestbook and integrating with the SWISH-E site search facility), along with more advanced lore like the CPAN code archive, Perl's object-oriented features, storing user data in DBM databases, and publishing modules for reuse by others. Along the way, the book teaches a respectable amount about UNIX, as well; the main text, as well as the many informative sidebars, contain concise and clear explanations of necessities like stdin/stdout redirection; chmod and file permissions; shell filename globbing; tab completion in bash; network troubleshooting with traceroute; and much more.
WebObjects is not a 'cookie cutter' website management and creation tool.
It's a tool to allow for the programmatic creation and manipulation of a website, with the capability to create standalone or connected Java apps and applets to boot.
Well, there's the thought that spending a week learning 'stuff' is a non value add activity.
At the end of the week, has the employee produced $700 worth of work? Or just consumed $700 worth of paycheck?
Whereas, with a tool, at the end of the week, $1400 was spent, but $700+ was produced because for 39 hours the employee was working on producing content?
In another analogy, is your time spent better that writing a new word processor, or is the boss's money better spent buying you Word?
It just recently occurred to me; why are people always rolling their own, instead of using production quality stuff?
Sure, some people can't afford a $700 package like WebObjects, but then, if you're worth $20 an hour, that's only 35 hours worth of time... or one week.
If you can get up in one hour what takes you one week 'learning from scratch'... as well as not having to write *or* maintain tools... isn't that money well spent?
Maybe because it cost $70M to develop, and $10M to build?
Therefore the next model would probably only cost $10M+, and the one after that, etc?
Just guessing.
I believe *everyone* is a fan of Apple luxury hardware...
It is only those who can't afford it who bitch about Macs vs PCs!
Another question then; will this be a 'one user at a time' machine?
Because it may make more sense to have a fairly hefty tower + some terminal like device (iBook, iMac, eMac, etc), rather an end-all-be-all tower.
Meaning you take the iBook and log in as necessary to the tower (wireless natch!) to do your C++ compute intensive stuff while she gets the tower to do her JBuilder stuff.
Every tower comes with a dual head video card. The base card is a Radeon 7500 I believe, upwards to the GeForce4MX up to the GF4Ti. I don't think the Radeon will do you poorly at all.
Right, but you said "With the announced new graphics pipeline through OpenGL and it's requirement of 32 MB of video RAM I'm betting we'll see that met across the board."
What the Apple page says, bolding mine, "nVidia: GeForce2MX, GeForce3, GeForce4 Ti, GeForce4 or GeForce4MX. ATI: any AGP Radeon card. 32MB VRAM recommended for optimum performance."
So what you mean is "With the announced new graphics pipeline through OpenGL and it's recommended 32 MB of video RAM I'm betting we'll see that met across the board."
I'm not disagreeing, you won't see the full advantage of QE with only 16mb of VRAM, so I'm sure everything will get bumped up to 32mb, or more.
The CPUs, at 800MHz or higher, is no big thing. Really.
The current bus speeds, at 133MHz, is nearly 6-8 times slower than the the CPU. Some of that memory bandwidth is also being allocated the AGP, DMA transfers, firewire transfers, and just about anything else in the Apple mobo that uses the RAM. So the CPU is *starving* at the GHz level, especially at the dual CPU level.
Being force to wait 10 cycles while waiting for memory is bad.
On the PC side a CPU may be 2GHz now, but the memory is also quad pumped 133MHz as well. 2x the CPU but *4* times the memory bandwidth.
So yes Apple needs faster CPUs, but they need faster memory even more.
Let's hope for DDR interfaces come MWNY
This still doesn't prevent a hybrid-electric diesel (HETDI?) design.
Keep the diesel engine running at a low rpm continuously (useful for highway runs), and even in the city, where it might have a lower rpm mode, to recharge the batteries.
But rely on the electric motors and regenerative braking for the stop and go, only shutting off the engine after a good amount of time. Instead of starting and stopping at every light, keep it running for a while (say 15 minutes), and if it doesn't get goosed, then shut down until the car enters a freeway situation.
Or better yet, have a switch/toggle between city and highway mode, and let the driver decide.
The problem is that in the two cars cited, they can both average 50mpg...
So if a Civic hybrid and the Jetta TDI can both hit 50mpg, then the Jetta will have more particulate emissions than the Civic...
Me, I'm waiting for a TDI hybrid for the best of both worlds...
Then I'm waiting for a Jetta TDI *hybrid*.
Since the Civic and Insight are gasolene hybrids, and a conventional Civic gets about ~30mpg -> ~50mpg, a TDI might get much better mileage with a hybrid electric system.
But in the meantime I'm considering the Civic because it gets more horsepower for only slightly less mileage.
Considering that they don't have the hardware to run such a server (yet), it's not unreasonable to be running on Solaris hardware at all.
Doesn't seem to work for me. There are two spaces between / and /etc/hosts as well?
They could be running it with Web Objects on Solaris, couldn't they?
Or what are you suggesting that I don't understand?
The interesting bit is that this material is so strong that it's incredibly brittle, like glass...
So it will shatter on impact. If paired with the proper components, it may be a very interesting crush-zone type frame.
Because one day it will be used in a car frame in which you will be sitting in, and will not only make the car more fuel efficient, due to weight, it will enable you to survive an accident you would not otherwise.
I read it was released in the US first, though :)
No, I don't, but some people do, and that's all that matters, right?
:)
Besides which, Quake1, 2, and 3 pushed the hardware that we take for granted today; GeForce2/3/4, Radeon 7000/7500/8500, Voodoo, Voodoo2, etc.
So because of one we get the other, and vice versa
Look at...
g r ce3
OS X
iMac
iMac2
iBook
iPod
PowerBook
Handsprin
Newton
Palm Pilot
CrossPad
ViaVoice
Metal Gear Solid: Sons of Liberty
Spider-Man
Lord of the Rings
The Matrix
The Matrix:Revolution
VooDoo
VooDoo2
GeForce
GeFo
GeForce4
Quake3
Doom3
I'm sure there are more.
Don't count on it, since there's a single button to turn them on in the control panel :)
Well, the Mac already has a 32mb DDR Radeon, that's not a problem :)
And it weighs 6 lb on its own, for $2500, so your Dell isn't exactly that much cheaper. 1GHz more and an additional 3000 pixels, yeah, I know.
Alright, $5000 for a 20" LCD on a 1.4GHz Athlon.
Now, let's see if I can do better (I know I can't beat 13lb).
Apple Titanium: 6 pounds, 1280x854 15" screen 667MHz *and* DVI out. $2500
Apple 22" LCD: 25 pounds, 1600x1024 22" screen, DVI in. $2500
So yeah, you'll have to lug around 31 pounds to lan parties, but that's still lighter than a 17" monitor, and you get 6" of additional screen, cost you the same, get you less processor power, but more battery life, and nearly 3x the number of pixels.