Recently, Kevin Lawler posted an “Informal Technical Note” saying that Apple could clean up on licence sales if only they’d support web backend development. There are only two problems with this argument: it’s flawed, and the precondition probably won’t be met. I’m sure there is an opportunity for server-side programming with Objective-C, but it won’t be met by Apple.
The argument is flawed
The idea is that the community is within a gnat’s crotchet of using ObjC on the web, if only ObjC were slightly better. This represents an opportunity for Apple:
- Licensing fees
- Sales of Macs for development
- Increase share of Objective-C at the expense of Java
- Get more devs capable with Objective-C, which is necessary for OSX & iOS development
- Developer good will
- Steer development on the web
Every one of these "opportunities" seems either inconsequential or unrealistic. Since the dot-com crash, much web server development has been done on free platforms with free tools: LAMP, Java/Scala/Clojure + Tomcat + Spring + Hibernate + Eclipse, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, you name it. The software’s free, you pay for the hardware (directly or otherwise) and the developers. The opportunities for selling licences are few and far between—there are people who will pay good money for good developer tools that save them a good amount of time, but most developers are not those people. The money is made in support and in consultancy. This is why Oracle still exists, and Sun doesn’t.
Of course, Apple already knows this, having turned the $n*10^4-per-license NeXT developer tools into a set of free developer tools.
Speaking of sales, the argument about selling Macs to developers is one that made sense in 2000. When Apple still needed to convince the computer-buying public that the new NeXT-based platform had a future, then selling to technologists and early adopters was definitely a thing. You could make a flaccid but plausible argument that Java and TextMate 1 provided an important boost to the platform. You can’t argue that the same’s true today. Developers already have Macs. Apple is defending their position from what has so far been lacklustre competition; there’s no need for them to chase every sale to picky developers any more.
I’ll sum up the remaining points as not being real opportunities for Apple, and move on. For Objective-C to win, Java does not have to lose (and for that matter, for Apple to win, Objective-C does not have to win; they’ve already moved away from Apple BASIC, Microsoft BASIC, Pascal and C-with-Carbon). Having ObjC backend developers won’t improve the iOS ecosystem any more than Windows 8 has benefitted from all the VB and C# developers in the world. “Developer good will” is a euphemism for “pandering to fickle bloggers”, and I’ve already argued that Apple no longer needs to do that. And Apple already has a strong position in directing the web, due to controlling the majority of clients. Who cares whether they get their HTML from ObjC or COBOL?
It probably won’t happen
Even if Craig Federighi saw that list and did decide Apple’s software division needed a slice of the server pie, it would mean reversing Apple’s 15-year slow exit of the server and services market.
Apple already stopped making servers last year due to a lack of demand. Because OS X is only licensed to run on Apple-badged hardware, even when virtualised, this means there’s no datacenter-friendly way you can run OS X. The Mac Mini server is a brute-force solution: rather than redundant PSUs, you have redundant servers. Rather than lights-out management, you hope some of the redundant servers stay up. Rather than fibre channel-attached storage, you have, well, nothing. And so on.
OS X Server has been steadily declining in both features and quality. The App Store reviews largely coincide with my experience—you can’t even rely on an upgrade from a supported configuration of 10.N, N^≤7 to 10.8 to leave your server working properly any more.
Apple have a server product that (barely) lets a group of people in the same building share wikis and calendars. They separately have WebObjects: a web application platform that they haven’t updated in four years and no longer provide support for. One of their biggest internal server deployments is based on WebObjects (with, apparently, an Oracle stack): almost all of their others aren’t. iCloud is run on external services. They internally use J2EE and Spring MVC.
So Apple have phased out their server hardware and software, and the products they do have do not appear to be well-supported. This is consistent with Tim Cook’s repeated statement of “laser focus” on their consumer products; not so much with the idea that Apple is about to ride the Objective-C unicorn into web server town.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen
If there is a growth of server-side Objective-C programming, it’s likely to come from people working without, around or even despite Apple. The options as they currently exist:
- Objective-Cloud is, putting it crudely, Cocoa as a Service. It’s a good solution as it caters to the “I’m an iOS app maker who just needs to do a little server work” market; in the same way that Azure is a good (first-party) platform for Microsoft developers.
- GNUstepWeb is based on a platform that’s even older than Apple’s WebObjects. My own attempts to use it for web application development have hit a couple of walls: the GNUstep community has not shown interest in accepting my patches; the frameworks need a lot of love to do modern things like AJAX, REST or security; and even with the help of someone at Heroku I couldn’t get Vulcan to build the framework.
- Using any Objective-C environment such as GNUstep or the Cocotron, you could build something new or even old-school CGI binaries.
If it were me, I’d fork GNUstep and GSW. I’d choose one deployment platform, one web server, and one database, and I’d support the hell out of that platform only. I’d sell that as a hosted platform with the usual tiered support. The applications needed to do the sales, CRM and so on? Written on that platform. As features are needed, they get added; and the support apps are suitable for turning into the tutorials and sample code that help to reduce the support effort.
Of course, that’s just me.
