Official Rubicode Statement Regarding EOGenerator and Leopard

From: Doug McClure (myramok..mail.com)
Date: Tue Oct 30 2007 - 01:44:18 EDT

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    Hi all. I apologize for sending this to so many groups, but I wanted as
    many to get this information as possible.

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    On Oct 29, 2007, at 6:56 PM, Kieran Kelleher wrote:

    Is a Leopard version coming?

    Thanks, Kieran

    A very good question and one we've been thinking about a lot recently, so here is the Officical Rubicode Statement about EOGenerator and Leopard.

    EOGenerator (and EOReporter and DBEdit for that matter) are based on the Objective-C version of EOF. By using Objective-C, we were able to extend many EOF classes so that we could build our tools easily, and in EOGenerator's case, to add additional methods that were easily accessible in your templates..

    As of WebObjects 5, Apple effectively EOL'ed the Obj-C EOF for public consumption, but because EOModeler and WebObjectsBuilder depended on those frameworks, they had to continue delivering them as private frameworks, which we gladly took advantage of. However, we are well aware that as of 5.4, Apple has officially deprecated those applications as well as the private frameworks that we depended on.

    It IS still possible to run these tools if you obtain the private frameworks and add them to your system from the previous developer release. We have not tested this ourselves, but we have heard that it worked fine.

    Currently we have no plans to make a version of DBEdit to work under 5.4. There is too much code, and too many Objective-C tricks required to think about a Java version at this time.

    As for EOGenerator, that is a bit more difficult question. We realize that EOGenerator is an extremely popular tool among the WebObjects community, and we would very much like to continue to support the tool, although neither Carl nor myself are working with WebObjects professionally at the moment. We are left with two choices: recreate the necessary Objective-C classes we need to support the model or rewrite the application in Java. The first is not ideal as that places more work on our shoulders to stay in sync with the any changes to EOModel, and the latter would mean would sacrificing template compatibility to go with an existing Java product (most likely Velocity). Either solution would certainly take a bit of time.

    If we do redo EOGenerator, we will also redo EOReporter as the majority of the code base is the same.

    Now Mike Schrag apparently has a EOGenerator replacement that he is looking to add to WOLips. That is a completely separate project that we have no information about at this time, but we have every reason to believe that this will be a very useful tool that may remove any need for us to redevelop ours. And if that happens we'll be content to hand over the EOGenerator title to someone else, although we will miss it.

    We have greatly enjoyed serving the community with these tools for the past 7 years and are quite impressed with how many of you have made EOGenerator part of your projects. We are looking forward to what Mike has to offer and will be exploring what we can add to the community also.

    Any questions feel free to direct to eogenerato..ubicode.com

    Thank you all,

    Carl Lindberg Doug McClure



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