May 00 Viewpoint
Volume Number: 16 (2000)
Issue Number: 5
Column Tag: Viewpoint
Viewpoint
By Jordan Dea-Mattson
Apple's best kept secret...
It isn't AppleScript!
For many years, Apple's best kept secret was AppleScript. An
incredibly powerful feature of Mac OS that was, when it was marketed
at all, marketed by stealth. But now the mantel of "best kept secret"
has been passed and the focus of Apple's stealth marketing activities
has shifted to a new product.
And the winner is...
WebObjects! Yes, that's right. The current focus of Apple's stealth
marketing activities is WebObjects, a web application server for
Windows NT, Solaris, HP/UX, and Mac OS X Server.
Originally developed by NeXT in the early 90s and based on many of
the same technologies that underlay Apple's Mac OS X and Cocoa,
WebObjects is the oldest and most mature application server on the
market. Before there was Netscape Application Server, Visual
InterDev, SilverStream, HAHTsite, or Tango, there was WebObjects.
Now on version 4.5, WebObjects' maturity shows in the cleanliness and
quality of its architecture, as well as in the performance,
scalability, and reliability it delivers.
The Performance Leader
When building web-based applications responsiveness and performance
are critical. As Jakob Nielsen reminds us again and again in his
AlertBox web columns (see Links of Interest below for the URL), the
longer that people have to wait for a page to be delivered, the
greater the chance that they will "bail out" and you will lose a
customer.
As Nielsen's is fond of observing in his writings, in most non-Web
settings, if someone has waited more than 10 seconds without a
response, they will bail out and go somewhere else. Unfortunately,
web users are use to quite a bit of abuse in the form of unresponsive
systems, and they will usually wait 15 seconds before bailing out.
What does this mean for you? Well, on the negative side, it means
that for the best user interaction and acceptance you need to get
your page up there in 10 seconds or less. On the positive side, the
faster you get your page displayed, the more you will stand out from
the crowd. And as many sites have learned, strong and positive word
of mouth often trumps millions misspent on stupid SuperBowl ads.
On the performance front, WebObjects wins heads down. In a study
benchmarking the performance of a number of commercial application
servers - including Netscape Application Server, HAHTsite,
Silverstream, Visual InterDev, PowerJ Enterprise, Tango, and, of
course, WebObjects - conducted by the research firm TechMetrix
Research, WebObjects beat the competition across the board.
Pretty much across the board, WebObjects beat its nearest competitors
by a factor of 4, and always delivered - even under the heaviest
loads - the sub-10 second responsiveness that customers demand.
But don't believe me; check out the data for yourself. Go to the
TechMetrix Research web site and check out the Application Server
Performance Results for 1 to 10 simultaneous users and for 25 to 250
simultaneous users (see Links of Interest below for the URLs).
Scale Baby, Scale!
Hand-in-hand with performance, scalability is of equal importance to
the success of any mission critical web site. If your system can't
easily scale from 100 hits an hour to 10 million hits an hour, then
you are setting yourself up for a whole lot of hurting in the future.
First, as the TechMetrix performance benchmarks we discussed above
show, WebObjects nicely scales when servicing from 1 to 250 highly
demanding simultaneous users. On there own, these benchmarks are
excellent. But they really standout, when we compare them to the
other application servers in TechMetrix's study. When compared
side-by-side, it is clear that WebObjects handily blows away the
competition not just in performance, but also in scalability.
So, WebObjects scales well when running on a single machine. But how
does it perform when you need to distribute your load over 10s or
even 100s of systems? How easy is it to build a mission critical web
application that can easily be distributed across multiple machines?
The short answer is quite easily. The long answer, is that WebObjects
- like the restof the frameworks, including Cocoa, originally
developed by NeXT - is based on a distributed objects (DO) layer.
This layer allows you to easily take a WebObjects application and
scale it from 1 to 2 to 10 to 100 servers, allowing you to grow your
infrastructure to meet customer demand.
Always reliable
How many times have you found a web site or web application that
intrigued you, but when you tried to use it didn't work or broke down
at some critical point? And how quickly did you walk away from that
web site? The lesson learned here is, it doesn't matter how feature
packed and interesting, or fast your web application is, or how well
it scales, if it doesn't run smoothly and reliably, customers will
dump you and go somewhere else in a New York minute.
Once again, WebObjects delivers the goods. Unlike half of the
application servers that TechMetrix studied, WebObjects successfully
performed under all workloads. This coupled with it excellent
performance and scalability clearly show that WebObjects is able to
deliver the goods under all conditions.
Beyond Hygiene
Performance, scalability, and reliability are basic "hygiene".
Without them, you don't have a chance of competing, but they don't
make for a compelling tool.
So, how does WebObjects move beyond hygiene? Based on the same
object-oriented foundations as OpenStep and Cocoa, WebObjects, is a
highly productive development environment. If you are impressed by
the developer productivity delivered by OpenStep or Cocoa, you
already know the developer productivity delivered by WebObjects. If
you don't then you owe it to yourself to experience it.
WebObjects also includes a powerful collection of classes, Enterprise
Objects Framework (EOF), that gives WebObjects' applications easy
access to new and legacy databases. For example, the EOF features of
WebObjects allowed the IS folks in the office of the Secretary of
Defense to build an application that tied together numerous legacy
systems - many running on older mainframes - into a single
application with a clean and unified user interface. When building
its Personal Wealth application, Standard & Poors ran into similar
issues when trying to interface with existing databases from various
vendors. Again, EOF allowed Standard & Poors to build a single
application that presented a clean and unified human interface to
users. In fact, much of the power of WebObjects comes from EOF.
Without it, WebObjects would not be as powerful a tool as it is.
If it is so good, why isn't everyone using it?
Given what you have learned about WebObjects, you are probably asking
yourself, "If it is so good, what isn't everyone using it?"
The answer in part, is Apple doesn't advertise WebObjects. But if we
think that Apple should advertise WebObjects, we have to ask
ourselves, what would be the impact? How would an ad for WebObjects
from Apple be received by the average reader of The Industry Standard
or PC Week? Probably with a high degree of skepticism. Given Apple's
track record in the enterprise, it probably doesn't make a lot of
sense for Apple to throw dollars into advertising for WebObjects.
Rather, they need to focus on making sure that the decision-makers
considering a project know about WebObjects and its power.
So, how do we get WebObjects in front of decision-makers with
creditability? First, we need to have powerful success stories to
which we can point. With over 3,000 mission critical applications
already built using WebObjects from many high profile companies,
Apple has a rich field of candidates for success stories. And Apple
has done an excellent job of collecting WebObjects success stories
from this field. If you are interested you can find them at Apple's
WebObjects web site (see Links of Interest below for the URL).
WebObjects, like other application servers, is going to be sold
one-on-one. Be it by Apple sales reps or Apple partners, the sales of
WebObjects will happen in one on one settings. It is when someone,
armed with the success stories that Apple is producing, can talk to
someone looking to build a web application, that the sales of
WebObjects will happen. Advertising won't drive it in any meaningful
way. So, maybe Apple's stealth marketing makes sense. If advertising
isn't going to drive sales, why waste the money? Maybe Apple isn't as
dense as many of us thought!
Want to learn more?
If reading about the power and advantages of WebObjects above has you
interested in learning more, there are a lot of resources available
to you.
First and foremost, you can start off by reading Sam Krishna and
Patrick Taylor's first article in their series on developing with
WebObjects, "Everyone meet WebObjects. WebObjects meet everyone."
starting on page <EDITOR PLEASE ENTER> in this issue. If you are
serious about learning more about or using WebObjects, make sure you
read their entire series as it unfolds over the course of the next
year.
Surprisingly enough, Apple has a large amount of material available
for you on their web site. If you are looking to explore things from
top to bottom, then check out the Apple WebObjects home page (see
Links of Interest below for the URL). If you are looking for a
balanced, third-party perspective on WebObjects check out the IDC
WebObjects White Paper posted on Apple's web site (see Links
Mentioned below for the URL).
Links of Interest
