WWDC1997 Session 208

Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en and gentlemen please welcome to begin senior evangelist Rack City evangelism Jordan D Matson [Music] good afternoon you've heard a lot of discussion in session yesterday and earlier today about the yellow bar and how this will be the platform for you to be able to write software and deliver that software the multiple platforms in one fell swoop in this session we want to give you an in-depth look at the yellow box so that you understand how it's built what it will do for you what it won't do for you and how to take advantage of it in planning your software development for Rhapsody and for the yellow box to do that we first have to change the title or accession when we originally were planning these sessions the only term we had to refer to things was Rhapsody or open step now we have our terminology our nomenclature of yellow box and such so this is really the yellow box technical overview and will I'd like to invite up now Peter Griffin Eno the director of yellow box engineering to give us a tour of the yellow box and explain how you can take advantage of it here thanks Jason hi everyone well it's no WWC my name is Peter graphene on director of yellow box engineering and I'm going to take you through some of the technologies that make up the yellow box I'm going to cover today first off is sort of what is this yellow box thing we're all talking about what are some of the guiding principles we've had over time as far as designing api's code a functional overview of the yellow box components and some comparisons as well as some opportunities for you this is diagrammed roughly based on diagrams you may have seen before what we're zooming in on today is the yellow box and to clear up some of the confusion perhaps that's out there about next step products and terminology let me just cover this slide here next step was next Mach based operating system which we shipped for a number of years from 1989 to about 1994 and last released was called next step three three then there was a kind of rethinking of the api's that we called open step actually collaborated with sun partly on these and this was kind of the second generation of the next step application frameworks the products based on open step are open step for Mach 4x which you have a copy of 4.2 as well as as we have all heard about at the conference open step for Windows which is a pretty exciting opportunity moving forward though we're talking about something that's a little bit different than open step we're talking about the yellow box so to throw in some technologies first we start with some next technology open step api's distributed objects enterprise objects our database access layer web objects and display post code coming from the next side in the Apple side we're throwing in some great stuff QT ml already a cross-platform technology color sync GX typography and the Apple advance look and feel so these two components together are making up what we call the yellow box the yellow box what we have is a cross-platform application substrate that really is sort of a platform in its own right and we like say it's 100 percent in buzzword compliant so cross-platform object oriented scalable enterprise ready media rich client-server world ready and Java enabled there you go now the yellow box is sort of a meta platform is highly portable in fact next we've kind of been in the business of porting that's least open step part around for the last few years we have it on the Rhapsody LS which is the mock plus bsd unix and essentially the same OS that next i've been using we have implementations on Windows NT Windows 95 obviously any successors to 95 and as announced Mac OS and just a question mark there to indicate that reported this thing before we could port it again any technology which kind of emerges as being interesting you can imagine yellow box showing up there so I figured I would take this opportunity rather than just sort of dive into a catalog of all the api's and technologies to talk a little bit about some of the guiding principles that at next we've used over the years to create api's and make developers productive and they all sent around basically giving developers leverage the first bit of leverage is leveraging your tools visual develop development tools powerful and consistent ap is factoring out common code from applications integrating industry standard technologies enabling component where and making applications work well together all of these items are about leverage whether it's your tools industry standards each other in the sense of component where or the platform it's really making you focus on the code you need to write to make your application special so I'll cover some of these items this section will probably have a lot of pointers off to other other talks so I encourage you to intend them in the development tools area you're all probably familiar with interface builder which is kind of the hallmark graphical application builder that we've had for very long times and works really well and we're extending it to support new technologies project builder the basic visual code editor enterprises object modeler which allows you to model relational database entities to objects to drive our enterprise objects framework and of course third-party tools I think many of these sessions have happened but if you weren't at them check them out on the show floor and there will be a session on Friday talking about our suite of visual development tools that you should check out as well powerful and consistent API is this is another kind of hallmark that we pride ourselves on at next and now at Apple of keeping paradigms simple and synergistic and that means keeping the simple things simple while at the same time making the complex things possible so there's no walls or cliffs in the API that you run into and you're kind of stuck and again you can't proceed with your tools so and we use our technologies to implement the API is themselves so obviously we need that kind of flexibility consistent and meaningful naming I think this is a key item that's often overlooked in some API is that you may be familiar with win32 era success I unknown I think sort of laughable names in Java for example they're 30 methods named ad which on the one hand you might think was you know well polymorphism and all that but you know taken to its logical extreme you'd have one method called do it in your API reusability of paradigms really important developers learn something once in some part of the API it should be applicable throughout and one example of that is the auto release strategy we use which I'll get into later factoring out common code again we think that when you're looking in the documentation for a toolkit it's not really reused to copy and paste code out of there this enables faster development cycles you're not spending your time copy and pasting code and finding bugs in it more consistent user experience for for users across applications because you're relying on the facilities reducing maintenance burden on developers so when we fix bugs everyone relies when we tune performance everyone gets the benefit of that and we think that's really important feature we take it pretty seriously and also the other thing about factoring out common code is that the platform can evolve sort of underneath you to add more features to your application and this is something we've used a number of times in next step for example in version 2.0 of of next step we had a system-wide back support and any application that used the standard print panel which every application did because it was pretty powerful but now fax with no extra code along the same lines is a session later today on designing objects where you reuse and extensibility suggest checking that one out technology integration again providing leverage this time sort of - to us as platform implementers we don't really want to invent technology for technology's sake but look to industry standards where we can so for example things like PostScript color sync rich set of standard data types RTF HTML TIFF EPS JPEG Unicode text we take all these sort of leaf technologies that are name brands and integrates them together and in those cases most of those things go into we call the app kit you take off-the-shelf relational database technology provide a powerful mapping tool into a framework we call EOF take some interesting object technology Java koruba ActiveX on Windows integrate those things together with our object runtime and media technology is like QuickTime quick draw 3d MPEG and a whole variety of other things that Qt ml supports and what you really have is a yellow box API is that if you look at the leaf technologies are pretty interesting set of cross-platform standards all kind of tied together in this one API and so you know if you just start doing some of the cross-product things like you know the combination of PostScript and relational databases maybe there's some interesting public database publishing apps a combination of of QuickTime and and post grip may be some interesting titling applications Java and relational databases we have a product called EOF that that does have have a Java interface so then you have great relational database access in Java so again you know mix and match as you will that's sort of the whole point enabling component where is important thing this basically allows you to leverage each other and open up your applications for extensibility so a bundle API at a low level allows kind of a cross-platform interface to loadable code modules including localized resources you can sort of have one packaging free or sort of plugin if you will that it's totally cross-platform and there'd be a DLL in there in the windows case and a shared library in there in the Rhapsody case interface builder palace is kind of an extension of bundles that allows us to drag and drop essentially application parts up in interface builder and we're extending that to support javabeans so you'll have build-up javabeans on application pallets and under Windows ActiveX components on on pallets and also using the sort of dynamic nature of this bundle concept one thing we think is pretty interesting is for developers to create custom plug-in architectures for their own apps because more and more these days applications are sort of becoming platforms in their own right and we think Java is actually a pretty interesting language to look at deploying as a as a plug-in architecture so another another one of our guiding principles is making apps work well together we supply a rich set of industry standard data types as as we mentioned before that gives applications a really good sort of lingua franca to talk among each other with EPS Tiff's RTF HTML if Unicode and peg and lots more and to go with those industry standard data types we've got a rich set of transfer services so that applications can move can move those data types around we've got multiple pace boards and drag and drop cross platform which is not dragging from one platform to the other but drag and drop implemented in terms of the native underlying platform in his natural way possible but we'll only one API for you to learn services architecture is another great example of how we make apps work together in one of the demos there was a screengrab that came out of a service the common one is the Webster's lookup again if you have a service you want to provide you just make a simple declaration and you're a menu item for your app will show up and everyone else is that filter services are kind of an extension of the services architecture which provides a translation mechanism so if you have an application that understands say TIFF images which are the standard raster image file format someone can drop in the system a translator that may say translate gif or something like that to tiff and if you do the right thing in your app then you can open up gif files as well as TIFF files which is pretty important and script ability we're working hard to put script ability into the application framework in the right way so that it's very easy to add scripting support to applications so to talk a little bit about the functional pieces of the yellowbox I have this diagram here which shows the application framework at the top level with the Java platform embedded in there at the lower levels we have display PostScript and the foundation framework and then this diagram I'm not showing EOF and web objects but those are there as well the application kit is basically the presentation layer code and a lot of the application services as widgets we have both pluggable and native look and feel so when you deploy your yellow application under windows it has the look and feel of a standard windows applications we have a pretty rich international text system which there's a talk about right after this I think which is really a pretty powerful system this is one area where I really encourage you to learn about because I think this is a great opportunity it's a very modular architecture and not not monolithic there's a lot of opportunity for developers to add add features to this system and I think will be a great basis of some applications moving forward again rich set of fundamental data types and data transfer services [Music] we'll see the application framework talk is tomorrow and the tech system talk is today right after this foundation kit is kind of the low-level collection classes strings arrays dictionaries that sort of thing as well as their automatic memory management facility which basically allows you to not have to worry about object ownership across API boundaries so it's pretty in some sense similar to garbage collection from the standpoint of an ADA client of your API you don't have to document whether they own the object they get back but it under under the covers is more of a a reference counting mechanism operating system installations provided by the foundation kit so they're abstractions around files IO read tasks that sort of thing run loop and notification services are part of foundation kit loadable component packaging that NS bundle object I was talking about is packaged up in the foundation kit with complete access to internationalize herbal resources and distributed objects which is similar technology to the RMI in the java world it's kind of the same thing for Objective C it's a language seamless remote method system for information about that there is a talk about the foundation kit also after this so I guess you have to decide between this and the text system what you're more interested in this apply PostScript window server this is our graphic system at the client-server architecture using the PostScript imaging model and compositing was added as a generalized bit blit for interactive operations and EPS is a structured is the structured graphics format in the yellow box and that's really powerful any application that can draw in any view can also print fax or generating EPS file from that view without writing any code that's as part of the view system so all the graphics you draw on your application can be captured as EPS and also you can render a pre-render EPS there's an object in the kid EPS image rep that allows you to insert EPS files into your application in a very straightforward way and actually see them on the screen which is a great thing and it really kind of raises the bar as far as structured graphics format code and is great for publishing there are two sessions about graphics and imaging today there's imaging under Rhapsody later this afternoon and there's printing I will be covered tomorrow java application integration obviously the first thing to say support 100% pure java code we're going to do that with a high performance vm and AWT JFC implementation also as announced we're collaborating with java soft on JFC to make sure the direction that takes meets all your needs for a real shrink-wrap native yellow box api S will also be available in Java so that means you don't necessarily have to wait for Java soft to figure it out you can using the app get in the Foundation right once and run on any yellow platform which essentially is all the interesting string craft platforms anyway so this is great news because you can have a single quote unquote binary which you don't have to recompile for each platform and also will run on future platforms wherever yellow goes for more information on this there's a talk on Friday about the the Java integration there's also a couple of other talks I think the uncommon object model talk is going to be repeated tomorrow happen this morning you didn't see that that's worth checking out I also talked on object oriented programming languages which goes into the whole objective-c syntax how that relates to Java and covers the things in a language level and that's on Thursday the enterprise objects framework I put a couple of bullets here and send you on a pointer to that fitzy as I said a relational database to object mapping tool it's very powerful this was kind of the crown jewel of next when it was going after the the corporate mission-critical custom app business its database independent scales to multi-tier client-server models you can write clients and servers that use AOF and it's got a pretty flexible transaction management system to find out more about that there's a talk on Friday that will bring it through that I encourage you to check that out so the next section is to talk a little bit about some comparisons of what we have with the yellow box and what other platforms are out there basically there are four interesting application platforms there's obviously the Mac tool box 1:32 MFC Java scoffs Java platform which is kind of an emerging emerging platform and apples yellow box platform which is what we're talking about today not really into talk about the Mac toolbox so much because I want to contrast yellow with this win32 and the Java platform so to run down win32 basically there's tons of shrink-wrap for that that's that's really no surprise it's not really cross-platform there are some attempts at cross-platform MFC but fundamentally it's not really a design point of 132 to be cross-platform the AAP is for a large to a large extent are really procedural low-level ap is NFC is true as in C++ but it's really sort of c+ closed bindings for 132 almost there's not really a lot of value added an NFC layer objects kind of are an afterthought the API is pretty old and things like MSC and Comm I've kind of come on as as as blue layers almost on top of 132 and Java Microsoft taking very pragmatic view of Java basically it's a language primarily and it is you know it's a great language for doing comm objects I mean let's face it built-in data types in win32 aren't necessarily cross-platform things like BMP GDI metafiles character encoding tables and that sort of thing I'll tend to be very Microsoft operating systems specific which is a different design point than we have which is sort of looking to see what's common in the industry and building in something like TIF into the operating systems that have inventing something new so to compare to Java soft Java platform with Java soft basically it's object API is only that's great it's cross-platform and processor independent really architecture neutral distribution format which is pretty cool on the other hand if you have legacy procedural C code it's sort of considered impure to use that in your java application so sort of a radical radical shift at least to get the hundred percent pure Java branding to sort of rewrite everything and it's you know it's not really mature technology it shows a huge amount of promise and but it is you know it does need to do some producing growing before you can really do shrink wrap with it and everyone has their performance and scalability concerns and again they haven't really set up a fundamental set of data types in some areas obviously for images and the lab they have the JPEG and gif support built in but they haven't really addressed rich text structured graphics in a reasonable layette and lastly it's really not ready for shrink wrap maybe for some very thin client web applications but if you're designing sort of next-generation fairly large app I certainly wouldn't embark on job at this point so the yellow box platform is a superset of the Java platform and that we we definitely think Java is an interesting direction and we want to ensure that that it gets as good as possible but we realize it's not quite there yet so we're encompassing the Java platform and kind of inheriting the good and overwriting the bad if you will our implementation of the yellow box is is highly portable so similar to the JDK which is a pretty portable hunk of C code our yellow box runtime if you will is also pretty portable the api's we have our mature proven technologies both the Apple API is from QuickTime and the openstep API is that we've been shipping for a long time they really work and it's true that the object API is primarily which is which is really good all the standard system services are in terms of objects but at the same time we're not religious about that and procedural api's are okay too we also as I said have a wide variety of cross-platform data types which we think is really important if you want applications to leverage each other and provide a high degree of sharing of data and it's ready for shrink wrap today and we think that it's going to be a great basis for future innovation and we're really I can tell you at that next we kind of been getting tired of porting open stuff and Mach 2 you know the platform du jour but we're all looking forward to doing some great innovation on top of this moving forward so we think it's a great foundation so let's talk a little bit about opportunities here and really this slide what I'm really going to build up here is kind of how I would view a new generation of an application to be built using the yellow box technology and for example two examples kind of think about if you're doing a 3d modeling package or something like that you have a bunch of rendering code it's written in C you've been tuning it for 10 years it compiles on 30 different platforms a great piece of code you don't really want to rewrite it that's great you can start with that suppose you have a bunch of C++ code you use it for document management and sort of your application core logic that's fine at the interface layer you want to use the the open step ap is to do your to your application presentation so use objective-c for that using the yellow box and then because we all think Java is an interesting platform and a lot of attributes of Java really make it a great sort of plug-in basis in that its architecture neutral and you have to go back to your plugin vendors when you need them to recompile for another architecture the the attributes of Java I think I think will probably end up seeing it used in mainstream applications initially sort of for plugins and we really want to enable that in a nice way and over time of course you can use Java wherever you could as we've said before right your presentation logic in Java with the open step bindings or with JFC for that matter if it meets your needs or your core logic can also be implemented in Java so really it's all about using the best technology for the job you have at hand and that's that's always been our pragmatic approach so in summary the yellow box is a robust cross-platform application substrate it's out there today next has a bunch of customers using it and there's actually a bunch of shrink wrap that has been done over the years in the yellow box and we're looking forward to a whole lot more so with that I get Jordan back up here and invite some of the team up to take some questions Thanks so wanted to make sure that we had plenty of time for Q&A so we'll be folks from the yellow box engineering team come on up why don't we do a quick introduction I'm Scott Forstall I'm an in java application technologies well Dan mold I manage yellow printing I'm Michael Pierce I manage the graphics group I'm Blaine Garth I manage the object runtimes group which is Java and objective-c runtimes I'm a Leo sir I manage the application frameworks group great well then let's start with some questions let's take from here Bob Krauss and Neil logic listen you're talking about open stuff and everything being shrink wrap ready now and I know that next step before open stuff and everything was really on a proprietary box but that has been under windows now for a while given that there has been some time can you cite any shrink-wrapped applications you know general purpose mass appeal shrink-wrapped applications that have been built using the open stuff environment my hospital yeah there's a bunch of technology from well Andy stone should create earlier which is a nice illustration package or the light house applications there's sort of a there's been a bunch of sort of page layout oriented applications that people have done here come later there's actually a bunch of stuff on the web their various next FTP sites if you go and look around you'll you'll be able to see some cool stuff what about those mass-market products you know like CorelDraw or something like this is it suited for that kind of thing is absolutely yeah I mean understand that while being next we had a very different business model Mathematica is one of these a climatic a great thanks Mathematica works works great on Mach because of the virtual memory it's really the joy to use there when we were next don't forget we charged runtimes so there really wasn't a business model set up for application developers and you know after after we got rid of hardware that was the way we had to make our money and so now all of that's changing again kind of looking forward to it also illustrator and framemaker there's also a Photoshop life program called Tiffany that's very interesting so there's libraries gaps that have been built here hi Jim Jarrett from Eastman Kodak I work on an application that for the most part was a port from Solaris and then we basically grafted a Mac app interface on top one of the last slides you showed was talking about get your C library with a C++ on top and then Objective C on that am I going to generally be able to do the same thing rip my Mac app interface off and put on them yeah I mean assuming that your code is reasonably well factored and the interactions are manageable that yeah that's sort of a whole a lot of it is C++ libraries for talking to devices and things like that I how much of that carries over well as far as the API is like into the core OS or whatever for device management I mean that's sure you know that's obviously a core OS issue but I mean as far as the engine logic that you might have that's totally totally portable great over here hi Peter's not local with design intelligence I understand Apple is going to continue to support the open step platforms that currently exist on hp-ux and on the Sun okay okay okay if I could yeah go ahead so okay I understand yellow box is a little different than just open step are there any plans to either move the yellow box stuff to hp-ux Sun or should I consider open step to be a common denominator I can develop two and have it run on Rhapsody as well as those other platforms first off the yellow box is a strict superset of the of the open step API so if you develop to the open step API today that will work as the yellow application terms of hp-ux and Solaris what we're going to continue to support in terms of going forward over there is basically the foundation kit and the portable distributed object that's back-end we need for our server based applications for example web objects and things like that and that will continue to be there the yellow box as you as we will not be completely supported over there in terms of like the app get and things like that so the app - it won't be supported the future extensions

• that will be will not be support or we

currently have no announced plans for hp-ux or for Solaris in terms of the app kit in terms of yellow box platforms that the yellow box is targeted for our Rhapsody Intel and PowerPC Windows 95 and its successors Windows NT and Mac OS would you considered a good strategy to code to the open step stuff or server style applications I'd have to turn that over that some like blame the foundation kit provides a lot of OS isolation as well as it's treated objects framework we use it underneath our EOF layer and people people have done distributed access built sort of an object cache on one machine that uses databases on another and spreads clients around with with do it's not it's not everything for distributed computing there are tons of problems in that area and I don't think of these days it might well be might well be suitable for what you need I'm going to be talking a little bit more about that on Friday at the networking api's talk ok coming back here Owen Owen Hartnett harlequin I'm interested in Corvis support and what's the extent of it and when will it be available like that you blame the best person for party on tape it ok um what we're looking at doing I think is is integrating the the Corbett facilities not necessarily directly into the objective-c runtime but as you know Corvo requires going to stub technology so we had a project on going and next to to provide corporate facilities and that's basically what we're what we're carrying forward I think it's in TBD item as to whether or not we'll actually ship or technology as part of the yellowbox but the facilities will all be there also a sense we're going to provide a full Java platform and of course a lot of other vendors like busy genex are going to provide Java orbs you'll be able to use korva fully if you're using our Java stuff okay thanks Penner over here just neighborhood an arc I haven't had the opportunity to program for open step before but I'm interested in what sort of issues if I were to develop a cross-platform application using yellow box what would I see in terms of big-endian little-endian issues in terms of data files and things like that have you dealt with that and how would we deal with that yeah I can take that basically I mean over the years we've I don't know ported to six or seven different processor architectures and one of the nice things about the development environment from a AC language point of view is that they're they're standard pound defines for OS and processor architecture standard macros for you know swap big to host swap close to big that sort of thing that that we tend to you know we have used in our implementation to make it totally bites X new strokes so you know I think rather than having to invent your own sort of processor pound defines and that sort of thing we we provide a lot of that since we're using the same compiler across platform so we have all those facilities and deal with them in the standard way the foundation layer offers about two or three different serialization protocols there's a persistence framework in there that we use say to store the nib files that hold all the connection glue for your UI and when you go to and you get a chance when you build objects to encode them and that encoding format I mean we do all the byte swapping inside there's also various serialization techniques we use inside so that when messages across with discrete objects they all show up with the right fits and right patterns and stuff and so you typically don't have to do you know even know about those macros unless you are building your own file formats and stuff so we try to even isolate you from from some of those problems for we Canada over here Jory shields Eastman Kodak I'm interested in whether you're going to support certain other graphics file formats I didn't see picked and things like picked and bitmap on there I'm hoping those were just left off because they were obvious they were um they were they were left off because they're very obvious okay also I've actually done - we have picked good also flash pics as a graphic file for men are you planning on supporting that I just sort of been learning about flash pics a little bit and it is pretty intriguing so I definitely plan to look at it so you would you classify that as a nice to have yeah I mean it provides some some nice features and I think now at photo finishers you can get plastics as well as photo CD pictures out so that's kind of an interesting sort of emerging consumer level format which can be pretty interesting there'll be more of them - great let's say I go to this huh - the open stuff api's deal with what open doc was trying to do in anyway embedded documents with on others and so forth and and if so could we see a demo I love you I'll take that there I know for the most part we don't provide the rich you know open doc had a lot of functionality for containers negotiating each other and getting their menus set up in the right places and so on but however what we are so therefore no demo but what we can what we are providing is you know we have very similar concepts to open up one piece of open dog was and I guess maybe ODF provided this was the framework for drawing and so on and so forth and we are view hierarchies and so on provide all those features in addition we're going to be you know we're going to allow you to integrate ActiveX components ActiveX controls and javabeans and AWT components within open set view hierarchies and that will get you that integration with the other technology that is fairly powerful as far as though that user level drop three components and they negotiate with each other for space and so on no we do not have those features I think there there is a lot missing that you didn't touch on but I is probably not the right forum to talk about this I mean documents container I mean what single document that all these embedded things can be contained in are you talking about this rectangle right talking about the view part of it which is what app kit does as far as that's that's how I was approaching it but yeah when you start talking about document format I think again we have we have several formats and foundation we provide serialization and peanuts formats for allowing that documents to be saved and read back in with various features such as blank mention cereal the Indian 'less problems you know go away and so on but as far as embedding documents and so on we do not support those things and I think the right way to support those is to look at the standards out there and see if we can just support those better and well open doc I mean okay why don't we take this offline to the to the wrap the yellow box API feedback form on Friday afternoon I think that's the right place and voices and we'll take it there Center I'll hear the Chells walls UK next step user group first I just like to follow up on the guy who was worried about the suitability of next step open step yellow box for shrink wrap apps I'd encourage anyone who's interested to go along to the next step open step development civilian because there's people there actually demonstrating apps that have been written and also just as an aside both doom and quake were originally developed on next step and now my question is do you have any you mentioned in the presentation that you had a sequester mark when you were talking about the platforms that the yellow box runs on saying you could move it to other systems do you have any interest in doing a yellow box for Linux no comment on that let's go to be out for one over here hi Steve Omni hacker design intelligence I noticed that you had support for jiff and I wanted to know if you have to get some special licensing to shrink-wrap something with chip support and also what kind of overhead is the yellow box going to have under Windows NT 95 or going to be like feet next we'll load up the hello world or something like that or on the firaon the first question in terms of the jiff support my understanding is that Apple has done a blanket patent license with data general is it over the what unisys excuse me unisys for that patent and so you're covered with that as far as the footprint on under Windows I think where we are right now is about something around four or five megabytes for the first app and then incrementally a few hundred K for the next app after that because all the libraries are shared and obviously over time we're going to compress that as much as possible we really believe in the philosophy of you sort of pay as you play and probably will separate things out in a little more lazy fashion to get that down even further what about just a general performance is it going to essentially be I guess axes in native libraries so if it comes to the cross-platform session on Friday we're gonna have a demo of the same app running on openstep mock at 4:00 - as well as on the open step Enterprise over the in T versus four - and I can't tell the difference between the two oh the hands of my boss will have that yeah you can also check that out in the hands-on lab back on the structured storage issue something just occurred to me that from I understand plastic uses all a structured storage there's kind of a competitive there's a real client file format that is more likely to be interesting Eric Eric Shapiro r le M Corp one of the nice things about the BOS is that it's very highly threaded and there's been some talk that openstep isn't very threaded that you can't for example draw to a window from two different threads within the same application I'm wondering what kind of limits like this we're going to hit up against and whether they're being addressed currently yeah you cannot there are some limitations in some pieces of the application framework the foundation primer is actually most pieces of our thread safe line right an application framework it's not as much thread safe and it's trying to draw from two separate threads into the same window will get you into trouble however I mean it's not clear why you want to do that but for instance one thing that wants to do that is AWT turns out and we're actually putting in some hooks here and there to assure that aw can do this for now and that it works you know with great performance and so on in and it looks like we're gonna be able to do that but also we're definitely our intent is to build more thread safety into the app kit and this is you know this not long-term it's not beyond unified we're looking at it to be able to do that in the short term so that you can do a lot of reasonable things from different threads now you realize that currently you can spawn off a thread to go do a lot of computations message back to the main thread and all that just works it's just when you start getting to things like drawing through the same window and so on and it's possible there's just a bit you know weird pathways you have to take but we're going to try to make it easier because you know like AWT is an interesting client and there might be others one other suggestion along that lines would be to document which classes and calls you can call from other threads I didn't see that noted in any of the documentation good feedback the only follow-up on that briefly it turns out that my team which is working on doing a full implementation of all of the standard Java platform including AWT today has multi-threaded drawing happening into the same window back in the labs right I mean it's happening and so the answer is you'll definitely be able to do it from Java and we certainly my team is pushing very hard to get that into the kit as a whole but we certainly will do that for Java Kenner it's Chris Evans with Microsoft my question is related to undo which I've noticed is lacking in most next-step applications I know that it isn't really handled by the app kit per se so obviously it's the core functionality in the Mac OS will it be addressed and if so at what point yes very it'll be addressed in you know in a short timeframe we are we have several undo technologies available for instance the EOF comes with an undo package that is fairly reusable and very easy and if you look at one of our draw one of our example to draw application it comes with a fairly good undo libraries and we're actually evaluating them too and put one of them in the kit where it's available in the framework to any app and it's really high in our blood over here I'll be a new software I just have a short question regarding the commentary adding scripting support thus this means that we have Apple script in the yellow box we're looking at Apple script strongly because there a lot of muched word there a lot of people out there who use Apple script and who have written scripts and so on now and but the very first thing we're doing is getting script ability into openstep because we currently do not have script ability I mean maybe hand in hand with undo obviously because you know the same sort of mechanisms are used but we want to get the script ability in the short term in there so that apps can be scriptable and then definitely you know look at the language problem and Apple script is high on our list however you know one thing that's not going to happen hundred percent compatibility first of all the vocabulary the same the same underlying toolbox calls might not the same and you know in addition there are certain necessary features of Apple script which probably will not be sported just because of the manpower involved but it is high on our list and we're looking at it Henner so quick comment my name is Mark Hartman with PDA solutions the gentleman on the end who just handed off the mic you might want to back you yes you mentioned that you wanted to make sure that we could do reasonable things with the app kit and I just wanted to remind you guys especially the ones that came over from next that what we Apple developers do is do unreasonable things because that's what progress depends on right well you know what you like we helped you do reasonable things and make unreasonable things possible so I think I think the comment that I'm Peter made in his presentation is a very beginning which is making easy things easy to do and making complex things possible is the whole under giant paradigm and I just a little bit of a thing here when we made the acquisition announced it on back in December I have to say that my reaction was fairly negative and I was going what the heck have we done and I'm I started digging through the stuff over Christmas through the month of January and such in my opinion went from you know oh gosh well I guess we can live with this - okay this is pretty good - damn this is the best thing we could have done and as I've seen the progress over the app over the few months and I've seen how open these guys are I think you're just gonna be astonished at how quickly this is going to develop how good it's going to be and I really just encourage you work with them communicate what you need and they'll work to make it possible and I should I should actually add one thing - they're a bunch of unreasonable things that you can do that a lot of them you know turns out objective-c is a you know fairly open to runtimes out in the open there's nothing really private if you want to I mean but you know it's like you're going to discover that their private methods public messes but they're really only unnamed because you can run around the runtime and do whatever you want and you both can address one buddy I mean I should warn you that you know doing those unreasonable things rather than finding the public api's and using them will really make our life much more difficult and also you know introduce a lot of compatibility concerns which will make going forward a lot more difficult so I think that desires wait to go forward should be communicating back to us saying there seem to be these api's are private we'd like to see them public or you know let's do the addition of these API that would really be the you know reasonable way to go here and and you know with developer feedback it's probably want to grow RAF City because you know bottom a lot more developers out there who've done a lot more than we've ever seen as next developers and we want to hear from you so bottom line is you still will be able to do awesome hacks from that cat this mic here Sam Griffith an interactive web systems I was wondering if you were going to do a source-level postscript debugger for the display PostScript system in the past it's been something that's been very difficult to debug your graphics so um we have no one from the tools came here the nearest thing is it graphics is Michael but um we'll give it to Peter I can answer one piece of that which is there is there was what the display stock seeing ages ago that was done under next step and I'm not sure where that code or who owns it now but we do have a little interactive program we call Yap on the system which is a interactive PostScript previewer where you can type in move to line two and see it happen which is maybe not quite the power you were looking for but certainly it is sorcerer yeah I mean we don't I mean other than this display talk thing it's actually pretty tricky to to implement because you end up implementing an interpreter on top of an interpreter but Michael is your goal also to make it possible for people not to have the right display PostScript I mean that's what you're shooting for in terms of Jarek we've got to talk this afternoon at six o'clock and we'll go into more detail there okay great let's push that off to that Center here with Michael up there there's obviously some work going on with GX topography how much of the rest of the GX graphic slide is going to make it interesting to learn about GX topography there's a session actually it's coming up you speak up coming up next in the room next door GX is not part of the yellow box as far as a graphics API come to the graphic session and we can talk about that more there okay far Mike over here yeah I you mentioned earlier that Apple script is high on your list can you mention there things it might be on your list like frontier or for what else well there's actually in the in the next step community I can't remember the name but no one knows that shout it out but there's been a number of scripting the objective-c runtime is so dynamically bound there's been like objective Perl and then all these very sorry pickle tickle you know if you surface the API in terms of Objective C there's a lot you can do in terms of scripting so we actually don't think there'll be a lack of obstructing opportunities out there Apple script has certainly been heard loud and clear as as something we really need to figure out hand in hand with that is frontier and figuring out how to bring that for so you know we'll be talking to Dave Winer figuring that out great thanks Senator Mike and then we'll go over here for one laugh and then that's it all right general Kenan had creative got a lot of things to ask about the imaging tomorrow I'll try to not bring them up here but actually today six o'clock six o'clock okay one the variable well the one suggestion hold on the one question about logging made me think of one thing that I hope you'll consider if we can't get any more of GX into Rhapsody we at least consider putting a layer on the output end of display PostScript that lets us catch rasterized shapes as some sort of object perfectly make build-up display lists from the output end of display PostScript that would be awesome technology for the pre-press industry oh it's just the comment suggestion text Michael you know lot of okay so what is the possibility of that happening I know snowball's chance in hell well I there's there's no way that anybody up here can make a commitment to do that or not to do that right now and so you just have to follow up with us it's good feedback zone and I think one thing that we have been investigating is PDF distilling which would at least get you to a non language saying out of the solve a language problem the norse parsing those object far cry from GX but i guess it's better than nothing for Mike over here yes you hi Ben wise from Digital Arts and Sciences Corporation just a comment I think what a number of us have been talking about when bringing up subject like which reject and open dock is we have a number of technologies we have a gigantic user base out there that are all used to having things like internationalization based on the Macintosh script manager which handles Asian multi by characters that it not far better than anything you've in a code is capable of and to just name a few the transparent drag manager where we can override an app drag tasks so we can have whatever is being dragged on the screen being in whatever code we want to write instead of whatever is the default and when we say Apple script we're talking about script ability and record ability so that no matter what the actual dialect of the script is in the users can have scripts made for them automatically by the actions and I just want to hear from you guys that you understand what we're talking about when we ask you these things what we're really saying is are we going to lose capabilities that we already have had for years that's clearly not enough not the intention here and what I mean that's why I feedback forms like this are great because we want to hear I mean clearly we know script ability part of script ability is record ability so you know I mean all of those things are known to us and we're just trying to we're trying to carve kind of a pragmatic path through all these technologies we're throwing together and I mean last thing we want to do is hold up getting things in your hands because you know there's some feature that some of you might want so we're trying to try to be pragmatic and some of the choices are quite difficult but we hope you're you're patient with us to comment call so one is you know this session for example just scratch the surface of what's in the yellow box and before you make judgments and decide that something's in or it's broken or doesn't work you know hit the other sessions for example International Tech is next next door right after this session and I think would be surprised to what you hear there and promote the right now let me just add something to that I mean you mentioned international text and that's yours my heart when you say Unicode you're right Unicode by itself is just you know it's not doesn't make International International System but one thing that we're really happy to find out that with our text system which is a unicode days and which is very expensive and so on combining that with the international technology and expertise Apple has we're in fact an account with something that's better than both of us had and I think we're very conscious in that area you're going to see some great advances in other areas as well you know we're working together to do the same sort of thing but in some case it's not so obvious or we have to do more work also I think I think people do understand what people are asking for and they're making choices one of the things I wanted I think that should be really made clear before we go off the air is that this you know we're bringing the best of both worlds together there our next alumnus working on this team there are Apple alumnus before the acquisition on this team people in key positions nobody has taken over it is a team working to bring a product to market I want to thank you for coming today encourage you to go to the other sessions and learn more about the yellow box and where it's going [Music]