Apple WWDC, June 2003, Moscone Center

Peter van der Linden

Up to the Moscone Center on Tuesday June 24 for a day at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference. A nasty moment on arriving - both buildings of the Moscone (North and South) were plainly empty, and chained shut. Had I misread the date or location? No - the WWDC was held in the new Moscone West building, across the road and down the street.

Exhibition Hall entrance

That had an exhibition hall on the first floor. Floors 2 and 3 had lecture rooms where Apple marketeers gave presentations in each of several tracks - The Enterprise, Quicktime, Core OS, Developer Tools and so on. I chose to focus on web objects this day. The 9:00am lecture was a bust. Billed as "Web Objects state of the union", it was just a series of bulleted lists with no analysis or structure tying them together. It ended early, I grabbed a coffee, and on to the next talk.

The 10:30am talk was "Web Object Technology" and was a fast overview of Web Objects. Everyone was expected to be familiar with Web Objects, and much of the talk was taken up with a series of demonstrations of new features. The best way to understand web objects is to view it as an application server, with some conveniences for an IDE built-in. One thing that surprised me was the news that JBoss, the Enterprise Java Beans container, is coming to Mac OS soon. I had earlier heard that a future release of Web Objects was going to be built on top of JBoss, but the conference info was that JBoss is to be a standalone product.

Lunchtime - Apple had laid on a box lunch for all attendees (class act - at most conferences you're on your own). The biggest single booth was the O'Reilly book booth. O'Reilly is really making a strong foray into Mac topics, while continuing to extend their Java portfolio. I bought "Java Extreme Programming Recipes" and read it over lunch. Then on to the exhibits.

There were about 4000 people at the conference, and about 70 booths, so this conference was about half the size of the JavaOne conference two weeks earlier. The booths were 6 feet x 2 feet stands, making it easy to take them in at a glance. I walked round them all. The exhibits pretty much fell into one of 4 categories: enterprise software, open source software, hardware accessories, and developer tools. I was surprised at how many XML and database exhibitors there were. I had expected more multi-media software products. Probably an end-user conference, not a Developers conference, would have brought them out.

There was a booth from OpenOffice.org, showcasing their Mac port of a complete, free Office suite. I run this at home on Windows and Linux. The Mac port looks equally good. However, the Mac port requires (and installs for you) X/Windows. OpenOffice are eagerly looking for Mac programmers to help them convert it to use Aqua, not X - apply to Open Office.org.

It would have been nice to see an IBM booth, showing off their PPC products. It would have been nice to see a Sun booth, extolling Java futures. It would have been nice to see an Apple booth, catering to Windows developers who want to switch.

I went into the public lab with the G5s (about 20 of them) and took a picture before the security guard made clear that both I and the camera had to go (why? the keynote was about the G5's, so what's the secret?).

The forbidden picture

They had about 20 G5s in the lab, so I am guessing this is the P2 build, ie. the hardware is finished and just needs QA and the software to ship. Sneaking back later, I spent 30 minutes hands-on with a G5. The Mac was running 10.2.7 rather than Panther, which surprised me. It was benchmarked the same way, using 10.2.7, so Panther on the G5 is clearly still undergoing final development.

I whisked up a quick C test program and saw that 10.2.7 is not a 64 bit OS.


int main(int argc, char**argv) {
    char * cp;
    (void) printf("size of a ptr is %d bytes \n", sizeof(cp) );
}

Of course, that assumes that the compiler doesn't use an option to flip between 64- and 32-bit mode, which may not be a valid assumption. Apple needs a 64 bit OS to match the hardware, otherwise we aren't getting the full potential of the system.

The enclosure now matches the "metal" look of some of the applications, like Safari. Not a coincidence, I am sure, but how aesthetic is either, really? The G5s have a raw industrial look, with the folded, drilled aluminum enclosures. I wanted to spray it glossy pearl white and put red rubber feet on it.

Once again people may buy a Mac not just because it is better and more advanced, but because it is so much faster than a Windows PC. There's been a lot of talk about unfair benchmarking (the Dell figures for this configuration use a different compiler, and are faster throughout than the Apple figures).

I read the full test report and I don't think the test lab did anything outside the scope of the usual SPEC benchmark sharp practices. Besides, the bakeoff showed some pretty good results. See the benchmark results at http://members.cox.net/craig.hunter/g5/. The G5 pretty much trounced 2GHz and 2.6GHz Intel processors. The G5 looks to be a damn good machine, and at a very good price, much cheaper than the G4 powermacs.

Some drawbacks of the G5 are

it doesn't ship till August, so isn't available yet.
the 200W heat dissipation is going to make it tough to get this chip into a laptop,
Panther may be a 64-bit OS so apps will need to be recompiled to take full advantage of the architecture. Existing apps will run in 32 bit mode. This news story claims that Panther will not be a 64-bit OS.

Heavy Metal?

In the afternoon, I went to the MacOS Server talk - good, full of solid information, and well presented. There is a lot of work being done to simplify administration, and make the software more enterprise ready.

Last presentation of the day was on XCoder - a new IDE, shipping in September. The talk took too much for granted, and didn't spend enough time positioning the product. So, does this replace Project Builder or complement it? Unclear. [I learned later that it is intended to replace Project Builder. So throw away those Project Builder books, and buy some XCoder ones. Also apps written using Project Builder will need to be modified if you want to use XCoder. And XCoder doesn't have Web Objects support yet.] The software looks good though, and if it is easy to use, it will give Microsoft Visual C tools a run for their money. It is still not as effortless as Microsoft's Visual Basic tools. Apple needs to look at Sun's Project Rave for a toolset aimed at winning over VB coders who don't want the OOP complexities of VB.Net.

Bottom line: the organization of the conference was great. The exhibits were strong. Some talks seem to assume too much background when introducing new topics, and would be improved by audience handouts and online notes.