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1995-10-30
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Item 9340782 95/10/30 10:35
From: LOZINSKI@BPG.COM@INET# Internet Gateway
To: ERIC@CDROM.COM@INET# Internet Gateway
Subject: NEXTSTEP NEWSLETTER
1. STEVE JOBS AND PIXAR
2. NEXTSTEP AND THE WEB
3. NEXTSTEP AND WINDOWS NT
4. OPENSTEP ON SOLARIS
5. JOB OPENINGS
6. BPG NEWS
7. FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS
STEVE JOBS AND PIXAR.
Steven Job's other company, PIXAR, is going public soon, and
presumably Steve is paying most of his attention to it these days.
PIXAR makes Renderman for building three-dimensional graphics
images. Renderman is known to at least run on Silicon Graphics,
Windows, NeXTSTEP, and Sun operating systems. More recently PIXAR
has moved from being a software vendor into making movies. PIXAR has
contracted with Walt Disney Studios to produce Toy Story, to be
released before Christmas.
NEXTSTEP AND THE WEB
All hype about Windows NT aside, NeXT is very focussed on the Web.
While lots of vendors sell tools for building static web pages, NeXT
is targetting the dynamic web page market., making big bucks there.
They have this "product" called WebObjects that requires the client
to hire an Object Expert for $25,000 per month ( @$150.00 /hr). It
is a nice little business that they have going. I am amazed about
how many people do not know about the competing product, WebRex.
WebRex replaces your UNIX http server and calls a NeXT bundle to do
the dirty work. I guess NeXT started losing sales to WebRex, so
guess what they did. The following is an extract from a letter from
Ted Shelton, president of ITS (which sells WebRex):
NeXT has changed their EOF and PDO licensing. It is our
understanding that it is now a VIOLATION of NeXT's license of either
PDO or the EOF SERVER to connect a machine running this software to
the Internet.
So much for Openstep being open. I suspect that if you used
WebObjects rather than WebRex, NeXT would have less problem with this
licensing issue.
WebRex is an interesting example of a three-tier client-server
application. The Web Client uses http to transfer requests to the
WebRex server, which uses a bundle to access the database. WebRex
has a pool of processes that service http requests, and block on
calling. I have been told that this offers better performance than
WebObjects, but it is still not a performance-optimzed design. It
would be better to build a multi-threaded server that would queue up
requests and allocate threads to active requests. Enough said for
today on the topic of multi-threaded servers for three-tier
client-server design.
You should also know that NeXTSTEP 3.3 has bugs in the Named and
Lookupd daemons so that they block on calling and cannot handle large
numbers of requests. This makes NeXTSTEP a poor server environment.
There is a patch to this, but it is only available with a premium
support contract. With the premium contract, Web Objects, and the
Object Expert, do not expect to run a discount NeXTSTEP Web server.
NEXTSTEP AND WINDOWS NT
Last January NeXT started to show OPENSTEP on NT to customers. By
next January, they still will not be shipping it. They plan to ship
PDO for NT in the first quarter, with OPENSTEP for NT, a bigger
product, to follow. NeXT is not a company rushing to ship a product.
For a long time, I have believed that something was curious, now I am
starting to have evidence. GNU Objective-C for NT is the missing
link. Although the GNU compiler works on NT, there are some
problems, and most importantly the debugger is not available for NT.
Nor is NeXT, as of Object World, working on it. How can they ship
the product without the debugger? Would someone please help me to
answer this question? If NeXT wants to be a serious player on NT,
they need to get moving. The competition is serious. Borland's
Delphi has shipped 200,000 developer copies. ParcPlace and Digitalk
have recently merged and just released their merged Smalltalk
product. NeXT should accelerate their ship date, because catching up
is hard to do.
OPENSTEP ON SOLARIS
Sun has 10 developers working on OPENSTEP on Solaris. They are on
schedule to ship in the first quarter of next year. They are not in
a rush to ship, but they are making steady progress. They have
modified Sun's C compiler to support Objective-C. They have extended
the compiler with a new key work for string objects. Be aware that
the code-base is separate from the NeXTSTEP code-base. The best news
is that the developers have seen X Windows and NeXTWINDOWS running
happily on the same screen. In my opinion this is the technology to
bet on, because Sun management is very solid and reliable.
JOB OPENING
Object Experts eat your heart out. Well known international
consulting firm seeks senior NeXTSTEP developers for challenging
projects in the San Francisco and Washington D.C. areas. Solid
NeXTSTEP background required, but even more important is an ability
to understand and solve the problems facing senior executives in
Fortune 50 companies. Presentation, communication, and the ability
to translate technical issues to the customer's management staff are
critical. The company invests heavily in training, and they have a
very formal review and evaluation process that will help you to
develop professionally. I always measure a person by who their
customers are. If you work for this company, your clients will be
some of the most senior executives in some of the world's largest
companies. I almost applied for this position, it would have given
me access to projects that a small company could never land and to a
variety of projects that an in-house developer would never experience
but in the end my love of publishing the NeXTSTEP newsletter proved
too strong (and they are looking for other people). If you are
interested, please call me at (510) 795-6086, or better yet, send
your resume to jobs@bpg.com.
2ND JOB OPENING
Los angeles opening. Work for one of the few profitable NeXTSTEP
Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Assist their customer's
in-house development team and act as a bridge between the customer's
site and the company's development team. You need good academic
qualifications and at least one year's programming experience in C++
and NeXTSTEP. The following are plusses: User Interface Design and
implementation experience, Graphics experience, and Silicon
Graphics/X-Windows experience. You will be given significant
responsibility, and allowed a chance to exercize your own initiative.
Give me a call at (510) 795-6086, or, better yet, email your resume
to jobs@bpg.com.
BPG NEWS
I just received "Partitioning Business Applications with Objects"
from Gemstone, the Smalltalk Database company (info@slc.com). The
article gives several examples of using an Object Database as the
middle-tier between the client application and the relational
database. I particularly liked the article because it quotes heavily
from my article on three-tier client-server applications
(info@bpg.com).
I recently completed several three-tier consulting assignments. I
helped my clients do their initial designs of three-tier applications
and evaluate the message-oriented middleware products such as PDO,
Teknekron TIB, DEC MSG Queue, DOME, and ISIS.
We had a new baby, Nina Lozinski, on September 12th. She is our
second child and was born five weeks prematurely because her mother
developed preclamptia. Mother and child are now doing very well, and
I am beginning to recover. My apologies for not publishing last
month's issue, but I was a little distracted.
HOW TO SUBSCRIBE
This newsletter is published monthly. Subscriptions are provided
free. If you would like to subscribe, please send email to
newsletter@bpg.com. Please specify whether you prefer NeXTMAIL or
ASCII mail. Feel free to tell me a little about how you are using
NEXTSTEP.
=END=