[Ham-Mac] Cross-platform development of amateur radio applications: Mac OS X vs. Mac OS 9

[ham-mac@mailman.qth.net]

On Friday, May 23, 2003, at 10:04  AM, James Wagner wrote:
> For what its worth, Cocoa is not all that its cracked up to
> be.

  Having worked in a variety of programming environments from
COBOL, RPG/400, to Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Cocoa, I'm
perplexed by that statement.

  Some people think that Cocoa is magical, or automatically a
faster or better answer. You are 100% correct in stating that
both Cocoa and Carbon are only interfaces to the system
libraries, one being object oriented, one being entirely
procedural.

  However, development time in Cocoa has been shown, in my own
experience and from many testimonials on the web, to be cut
by a fair margin. This has more to do with it's object oriented
nature, and the relative simplicity of Objective-C more than it
has to do with the Cocoa Frameworks, however, there is a lot of
power in the frameworks (and a lot of gaps, from my view...).

> Its also fairly clear that Apple is moving Carbon and Cocoa
> together so that over some period of time, they will be
> essentially indistinguishable (in terms of capability).

  Yes, I think it's fair to say that neither one should go away,
and both should be extended to encompass all system functionality.
I think that is a good thing.

> Frankly, my programming medium of choice is RealBasic. It
> uses Carbon and will compile for OSX, PPC, and Windows. You
> talk about cross-platform! This does it quite well and you
> need to know very little about the intricies of the
> underlying operating systems.

  I will admit to having *tried* Real Basic, but that was back
at version 3 on MacOS 9. I was expecting a package that was very
similar to Visual Basic, and unfortunately I found it to be an
unfriendly environment. That was for me, and is only my view,
I know it works for many others and they have great things to say
about it, and I'm not going to try to contradict them.

  This isn't really a good forum for topics such as this, so if
you'd like to continue, we should probably take it out of here.
In the end, it's up to the individual developer to pick the
environment that best suits their skills, abilities, tastes, and
projects. As long as more software is developed for the Mac, I
don't care what system is used. ;-)

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  - Steven M. Palm
  - Ham Radio Call: N9YTY
  - Attempts to make thine own star shine shall lead thee into darkness.
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