April 18, 1996 Subject: NEXTSTEP NEWSLETTER 1.SUN AND OPENSTEP 2.WHAT IS MISSING IN OPENSTEP ON NT? 3.WHY NEXT PROJECTS FAIL? 4.NEXTSTEP DEVELOPERS INSTANTLY AVAILABLE 5.NETKIT LOOKS REALLY COOL. 6.BETATRON CONFUSION 7.EULOGY FOR MACH OS 8.LONG LIVE MACH 9.NEXTSTEP JOBS EMAIL LIST 10.WEB NEWS 11.WEB TRANSACTIONS NEEDED 12.WHICH WAY WILL THE INTERNET EVOLVE 13.JAVA VS OBJECTIVE-C 14.HIGHWAY 101 BILLBOARDS 15.SUN ANNOUNCES JOE 16. DAYDREAM REPORTS ARE GREAT 17.WANTED TO BUY DAYDREAM 18.NEWSLETTER NEWS 19.HOW TO SUBSCRIBE 1.SUN AND OPENSTEP Sun is currently planning on selling OPENSTEP User and Openstep developer as separate unbundled products, priced comparably to NEXTSTEP or OPENSTEP on NT. For a while, they had been distracted by JAVA Joe, Java WorkShop, Intranet WorkShop and NEO (CORBA) which are still consuming most of their resources. But now Sun is again paying attention to OPENSTEP. They are looking for an OPENSTEP product marketing manager. If you are interested send me your resume, and I will forward it to the appropriate person. This is good news. The NEXTSTEP market was ecstatic while Sun was planning on bundling the product with NEO user ($200). This market was depressed while Sun was correctly perceived as being distracted. Again this market will be upbeat, with Sun investing in OPENSTEP marketing. While Sun is not bundling the product, at least customers will now have multiple suppliers for OPENSTEP. That overcomes a key barrier to sales, namely managing the risk of NEXT as a sole source supplier. This announcement of Sun's decision to invest in OPENSTEP marketing is very good news for the NEXTSTEP community. 2.WHAT IS MISSING IN OPENSTEP ON NT? It is clear that NeXT does not have the resources to port all of NEXTSTEP to OPENSTEP immediately, so the hot question is what will be included, and what will not be included with each release. In the initial PR1 release of OPENSTEP for NT, new, never-before-seen features were included, but in the PR2 release these features have been removed with the intent to focus on quality. I do not know exactly what will be included in the upcoming releases. At the NeXT Corporate Users Group, customers were reported to have asked how will they manage NT networks if NETINFO is not ported to NT. I have heard that NeXT is telling their customers to use Microsoft CC: Mail on NT, presumably because NEXTMAIL will not be available. In general I understand that NeXT is not planning on initially porting the Applications, but rather is focussing on the libraries and development tools first. 3.WHY NEXT PROJECTS FAIL? I have had the great privilege to see many NEXTSTEP projects. Some are wildly successful, others are like pouring money into a seive, nothing much accumulates. A major cause of failure is poor planning. Prototyping is a powerful approach, but does not stand alone. A plan is also needed. People would never build a building without a set of design drawings, but they are happy to build software without these design drawings. A good plan must start with a description of the existing system. This is not just the existing software and hardware systems, but also a description of the business processes to be supported. With this baseline, it is possible to create a plan for the project. The business process plan describes how the company should be run. The functional specification determines what the software will do. The user interface prototypes show what the applications will look like to the end-users. Data Schemas define the relational databases, and Object Models document the application objects. The process descriptions define what processes will be running on the network, and the process diagrams show their intercommunication. The Data distribution diagrams show which processes and which data will reside on which computers. These are the engineering documents that are needed to build a sophisticated business application. They form the basis for concensus on what your project is building. They can also be used for engineering analyses to determine whether the system is able to function according to its requirements. These are very important documents. The projects I have seen that lack a solid design, are the ones that get into trouble. Let me know if you would like to see more articles on this subject. 4.NEXTSTEP DEVELOPERS INSTANTLY AVAILABLE I now have 77 active job seekers, experienced NEXTSTEP developers ready to respond to your job listing. For the last month, I have been successfully providing next day service. You tell me what type of person you are looking for, where the position is located, and by the next day, I will fax or NEXTMAIL you 5-10 resumes of people who fit your requirements, and have expressed an interest in your position. I know developers who have experience developing large corporate applications. I know developers who have up to 7 years of NEXTSTEP experience. I know developers willing to charge $40K /year. I know developers available to start work tommorrow. Let me know what you need, and I will find you the right person. 5.NETKIT LOOKS REALLY COOL. Netsurfer Inc.'s netkit allows you to build applications that merge corporate applications with the Web. It provides an Interface Builder Palette with a Web View. You can drag and drop a Web View into your applications user interface. Netkit merges Video, Audio, HTML, with all the grace of NEXTSTEP. Netkit allows an HTTP server to serve up a NEXTSTEP application, and run it in the display window. Great flexibility, serious security implications. Netkit includes a good HTML parser and the company hopes to some day build an HTML editor on top of it. Alas Netsurfer Inc is clearly underfunded. They only have 3 and 1/4 developers on the project, with the company president flying around the country demonstrating it. In practice, I think that testing is being pushed out to the Beta Users. But who cares? This is totally fantastic software, beautifully designed, that keeps NEXTSTEP an exciting place to work. Do your best to go buy a copy, so that they have more money to invest in development of this cool stuff. You should expect parts of the product to migrate to NT independent of OPENSTEP. Any Beta Testers out there with feedback? 6.BETATRON CONFUSION In the last newsletter, I mentioned the Betatron counting downloads of Web-Objects. Well accept that number with a grain of salt. Some people downloaded all three versions. Some percentage of the downloads were interrupted or not completed. Many others downloaded from the FTP site without registration. But the most important confusion is that some people downloaded multiple times, once for each new release. NeXT internally maintains the actual numbers for how many copies of each version were downloaded. It would be nice if NeXT would publish that more informative statistic. 7.EULOGY FOR MACH OS I can now say on good authority that NeXT has ceased investment in the Mach Operating system. Yes, the new version of OPENSTEP on Mach has been upgraded to be compatible with OPENSTEP for Windows NT, but the underlying operating system is being left as is. I believe that NeXT's intention is to mothball it, but who can say for sure. If it is the case that NeXT Mach will soon be history, I think I now understand why we should mourn for it. There are several reasons. It is the only operating system that supports fat binaries. It has very elegant integration of software. In last month's newsletter, I reported on how to fix the Multi-homed Server Bug in NEXTSTEP using dynamically Loadable Kernel Modules. There was even a module that allowed NEXTSTEP to talk Appletalk events. This flexibility and extensibility in the operating system is very impressive, and I believe not possible, and certainly not easy on Windows NT. So if you needed to modify the OS, NeXT Mach was great. But the market neither cared nor understood. 8.LONG LIVE MACH Meanwhile some NEXTSTEP diehards plan on running OPENSTEP on MACH for as long as they can. NeXT should encourage that by making a loud public committment to MACH as the alternative to NT. At the same time, they should make a strong committment to a long-term support of their existing NEXTSTEP Customers. Part of this would be to recognize that it is the individuals who helped make them a success, therefore their committment should be to people who helped them. Let the masses run OPENSTEP on NT, the more serious outfits run MACH. As part of this strategy, NeXT should write some software (a device driver?) for NT that makes NT fat-binary compatible. Similary NeXT should port NetInfo over to Windows NT, to allow for easy system administration of mixed NT-NEXTSTEP networks. This would also allow some customers to migrate production applications gracefully to OPENSTEP for NT. 9.NEXTSTEP JOBS EMAIL LIST This part of the newsletter is evolving very quickly. A monthly newsletter did not respond to hiring managers needs for finding people quickly. In order to respond quickly to companies, I now have a separate email list for job announcements. On average, every day I post a new job there. Last Monday, I posted four different jobs. If you are looking for a NEXTSTEP position, you need to be on that list. I hope that this will soon be the most vibrant job market in the NEXTSTEP community. Recent postings include jobs in New England, Virginia, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington D.C., Ohio, Chicago, and Europe. Most of those locations had multiple companies looking for NEXTSTEP developers, usually for multiple developers. Industries include Telecom, Financial, Movie Production, Hotel Management, Insurance, customer support, nuclear power plant maintenance, shipping, and web server construction. There could be a position just right for you. How do you get on the list? It is easy. Send me your resume in NEXTMAIL RTF format. I will not send anyone your resume without your explicit permission. You will be added to the list, and you will literally receive a new job announcement every day. When you see a job you like, let me know, and I will send in your resume. If you ever have any questions, I am here to answer them. Almost all positions get filled directly from the list, so in general I will not be advertising jobs in the newsletter. There are a few exceptions. There are four types of people I have not been able to find enough of. There is now a very strong demand for developers in Virginia, $50-$70/hr. I am also not able to find an experienced database administrator who wants to work in Holland and also develop on NeXT. Also anyone with OPENSTEP on NT experience is very much needed. Finally anyone with SCI, SITK, Polygraph and other security clearances, it would be illegal to name, is needed. If would like to be on the jobs mailing list, send email to 10.WEB NEWS The following CD store application was built within 10 man days. This demonstrates how rapidly a server can be built with WebObjects. http://www.gonet.de/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Examples/VirtualCDStore Known Bugs in NeXT Software Version 33.2 has been released. It covers bugs in all of NeXT's products, including OpenStep and EOF. ftp://next-ftp.peak.org/pub/next/documents/KBNS.33.2.README.rtf ftp://next-ftp.peak.org/pub/next/documents/KBNS.33.2.rtf.gz ftp://next-ftp.peak.org/pub/next/documents/KBNS.verification.32.1.tar Cup Of Coffee has been Rreleased. It is a NeXT-based Interface Builder for JAVA. http://www.contrib.com/melonSoft Web Objects components are available for demonstration at: http://wofapps2.next.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ReusableComponentsEx or available for download at: http://www.next.com/Pubs/Documents/Download Lighthouse announces WebVision for building data-driven charts on the Web. http://www.lighthouse.com http://www.lighthouse.com/PressReleases/WebVisionAnnounced.html Web Objects notes are available at: www.cea.edu/jenniwoo/BANG_WOdevSIG The NEBULA CD ROM has a Web Site: http://www.cdrom.com/titles/nebula.html They sent me a free CDROM. It looks useful to me. It has the NeXT-specific version of the Taylor UUCP libraries on it. They also have a font garden CDROM with fonts and lots of icons. I like it when people send me free stuff. New Mail Utilities can be found at: ftp://next-ftp.peak.org/pub/next/submissions/mailapp-utilities.1.5.NIH S.bs.tar.gz On peanuts you should be able to find it very soon at this URL: ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/pub/comp/platforms/next/Mail/prog rams/mailapp-utilities.1.5.NIHS.bs.tar.gz ENHANCED MAIL Bundle Version 1.2 is available at ftp://next-ftp.peak.org/pub/next/submissions/EnhanceMail.1.2.NIHS.bs.t ar.gz ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/pub/comp/platforms/next/Mail/bund les/EnhanceMail.1.2.NIHS.bs.tar.gz NXAPP and OPENSTEP quarterly journal is on a cd-rom called Developer Source. It includes AI Expert, Byte, C++ Users Journal, Client/server Computing, Data Comm, Delphi Informant, Dr. Dobb's, Pretty much all the IEEE publications, MSJ, NXApp, Open Computing, Openstep Journal, OS/2 Developer, Software Dev, Sysadmin, UNIX review, Windows Developer's Journal... and more. Includes Windows-based Search Engine. $450/Yr. Contact support@i-mode.com or 800 370-6717. 11.WEB TRANSACTIONS NEEDED NeXT is very wisely targeting Web interfaces to relational databases. At Web Mania, Steve Jobs gave the example of one of his employees who ordered flowers across the Web. In the middle of the process, the network crashed, so there was no way to tell whether the transaction made it to the server or not. The situation was further complicated because the flower company's customer-service database was different from their internet server database. Steve Jobs correctly concluded that they would be better off if they had used a single database, and built their application using Web Objects and EOF. He failed to note that the problem is at least partially the fault of the middleware connecting the Netscape browser and the server database. Netscape browsers do not support guaranteed message delivery from the client to the server. They do not support the concept of committing a transaction locally, and rolling it up to the server as soon as it is available. This feature is essential for mission-critical Web Applications. If it had existed, the flower buyer would have been confident that the order would be processed as soon as the server was reconnected to the web. In my opinion, NeXT should be doing such Netscape Browser extensions to work with their Web Objects product, and target mission-critical Web-Applications. That would give them a significant competitive advantage against the other Internet server development tools. 12.WHICH WAY WILL THE INTERNET EVOLVE In the Web Objects presentation, NeXT stated a future direction of JAVA on the server. This is an interesting direction, but I think that NeXT must have excellent market intelligence if they know which direction the Web will go. I think that they should adopt a different corporate strategy. They should acknowledge that it is impossible to predict the future of the Internet, and that the best way to stay on top is to scatter many seeds and harvest the ones that succeed. NeXT should actively encourage the third-party market, treat all ISV's equally, buy out the promising companies, and use NeXT's market presence to push the interesting products. Let us look at the history of opportunities. I understand that the Web was originally developed on NEXTSTEP. NeXT could have cloned the software, created a fantastic PDO server, and be where Netscape is today(almost). Once the basic Web worked, people needed an easy way to author HTML. There was a company called Pages that developed a GUI HTML editor, which eventually closed down. NeXT could have bought it out for not much and published an HTML editor back when most servers were still being developed by hand. Dynamic Servers are the next big item in the evolution of the Internet. Earlier last year ITS released WebRex, which beat Web Objects to market by many months. It is a pity that NeXT was not able to buy the WebRex product and ship earlier. (Instead the two companies developed such an antagonistic relationship that even I got caught in the middle. ) Other opportunities are continuing to appear. NeXT could buy Netsurfer and blow away the competition. There are undeniably other interesting products out there. All of these would benefit from having a billionaire behind them. Most of the vendors would be willing to swap intellectual capital for stock in a company that could go public. The real strength in the NeXT market is the originality and entrepreneurialism of the developers. NeXT needs to invest in that community and harvest the results. And what if the developers wanted too much stock for their application? Why clone it and pay them nothing of course. ( I hate to say that, but my readers have asked me to give a balanced newsletter). 13.JAVA VS OBJECTIVE-C One reader asks whether JAVA will end up surpassing both Objective-C and even Smalltalk, becoming the language that brings dynamics and extensibility beyond the educated few. I think not. First of all, it is not clear that JAVA will become as hot as its hype indicates. The applets are large, so download speed is an issue. Its performance is slow, so it will depend on Microsoft actually releasing the Just-In-Time Compiler (JIT) scheduled for end of summer. With such speed improvements only on Windows, it will no longer be effectively cross-platform. Furthermore, JAVA reportedly has large security holes, which make is unsafe to download JAVA apps from the internet to inside a firewall. But if it's corporate use is therefore restricted to intranet applications, there are better tools. While JAVA is interesting, Java is not the solution to all problems. 14.HIGHWAY 101 BILLBOARDS NeXT had a very nice billboard on Highway 101, in redwood city, announcing the Web Mania event. They kept it up long after the conference was over. Two weeks ago it was closed down. This week they put up a new billboard announcing that WebObjects is now shipping. Where else but Silicon Valley do software companies buy highway bill-boards? 15.SUN ANNOUNCES JOE Two weeks ago, 3/26, Sun launched Joe, a netscape plug-in that talks to CORBA servers directly. Joe is freely available and Internet downloadable beginning with a Beta version in late April and First Customer Ship this summer. 16. DAYDREAM REPORTS ARE GREAT Generally customers are quite pleased with Daydream's ability to turn a NeXT computer into a Macintosh. You can read the review article on Daydream in Issue # 2, October 1994 of the NeXT IN LINE Magazine. Page 23. Try or failing that . Of course it costs some $700 dollars new. For twice that price, you can buy a new Macintosh. Alternatively, you can use the Partner product from IPT to integrate Macintoshes with NEXTSTEP. It does file and printer sharing. Their phone number is (805) 541-3000. Their fax is (805)541-3037. It is also available through opensource . 17.WANTED TO BUY DAYDREAM Does any one have a copy of daydream to sell. If so, please let me know. Send email to lozinski@bpg.com My posting on usenet did not find any sellers. I guess the owners like daydream too much to sell their copies. 18.NEWSLETTER NEWS There are big changes happening with the newsletter. The newsletter has become a full-time activity for me. It has become profitable. (Not bad for a free publication) Its quality is improving; I am more carefully previewing stories with the appropriate individuals. Its coverage is improving; I am more carefully scanning usenet to not miss any important events. I am getting better at seeing the trends; I described the Sun situation quite well last month, with really very limited information. The subscriber base is growing rapidly. The newsletter is widely read within the NEXT community. Even last month's critic clarified that he dropped his subscription because he was receiving it from a separate distribution list. Another person within NeXT wrote to say: "I think your newsletter is really good-- very readable and informative. I strongly disagree with whoever wrote you the 'unsubscribe' message." One reader told me that he no longer reads usenet he just reads the newsletter. I hope that that will be an increasing trend. Altogether, it means that the newsletter has become an institution in the NeXT marketplace. 19.HOW TO SUBSCRIBE This newsletter is published once a month. Additional newsflashes go out occasionally. Subscriptions are provided free. If you would like to subscribe, please send email to newsletter@bpg.com. Please tell me a little about how you are using NEXTSTEP. To make my job easier, please left justify your name and email address, one line each as follows: Christopher Lozinski BPG 35032 Maidstone Court Newark, CA 94560 lozinski@bpg.com Please specify whether you prefer NeXTMAIL or ASCII mail. Feel free to subscribe a friend. I am also very interested in posting this newsletter to email distribution lists. =END=