---
title: WWDC1997 Session 408
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc1997-408
---

# WWDC1997 Session 408

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en ladies and gentlemen please welcome web objects product line manager David Kay good evening thanks very much I appreciate your being here particularly given the timing establishments all over downtown San Jose are now opening their doors for a happy hour pricing and instead you've chosen to spend time with us here so it's very very gratifying or maybe I shouldn't mention that very gratifying Thanks what I'd like to do is talk with you about let's give you an overview high-level overview of the product we've got a whole series of great tracks that I'll mention at the end and I hope this will give you a good starting place for deciding which one of those might make sense for you and a sense of where as developers you might have opportunities to build onto the platform that we just announced that we're providing you with web objects I also want to leave enough time at the end for some questions and answers so we can get them you get gives us some details there but one really cool thing is that the products in your bags well I mean a coupon that's good for the product it's hot enough off the presses but it's not actually available until tomorrow the pre release of version 3.1 that you're getting but we think will be very happy when you when you pick that up and get it it runs on Mach it runs on Windows NT Solaris and hp-ux so you can you can take that and either in conjunction with the other prelude to Rhapsody pieces of Mach and the enterprise objects framework go with that or run on one of the other environments it's the same CD it works all the way around the other thing I'm very pleased about is that our friends and partners at open base have made a single-user version of their open base database which runs on mock available that means you'll have the ability to explore some of the power of web objects and working with the database if you choose to do this in the mock environment again right right out of the bag a little bit about where we come from because we're do to than that community web objects shipped in version 1.0 march 30th of last year and in 1996 we established leadership in the the enterprise internet application development markets really in in two ways one and sort of establishing the category of a web application server we started talking to people last March in April and and and even even this time last year about web application server they sort of look at us at is funny and now people understand the concept of a server that dynamically bends pages sits behind a web server and allows you to do the same things that you can do with desktop and client-server applications except over the web with all of the benefits that that brings we also provided rapid development tools and a class of products that integrates legacy systems things like mainframe applications in relational databases and existing code bases and pulls those all together so so that was sort of the product category side we also had to meet success on the market which was very gratifying the folks at sharper image were I think the first people up with a web objects application they did that at the first internet world in April last year and they were they had this business problem that you know catalogs this fancy catalogs you get from sharper image are really sort of expensive to print and they wanted to be able to add more products to them and expand their offerings and increase the margins that way but it's hard to do if you've gotta put in glossy printed pages or add more space in the show Michelle they wanted to do it over the web but with all of the changes that they were making and as dynamic as that site was they couldn't do that cost-effectively or easily on the web either until web objects came along and was able to give them a database driven application that we as users use to order products as well as a internal intranet application that they use to maintain and manage that database that had great deal of reuse across the base Dell kind of funny to mention at Apple they bought the product which is pretty smart and and of course Apple bought next which was even smarter but Dell does one point four million dollars of business a day on a web objects application that integrates mainframe data daily changing price databases it integrates their configure a and software you know how hard these pcs are to order and it allows you to to very rapidly configure an application that's that's a can configure one of these one of these PCs so that's that's great for them Nissan showing off our internationalization has put up a Japanese language virtual car showroom that you can get to tan energy is a kind of interesting one they had a kansas-nebraska energy they sell the pipeline space for for oil and gas and they wanted to be able to let their customers using an extranet application come in and place order for oil and gas and bandwidth whatever you call it in a pipe and KN Energy was able to do that in webobjects and save a tremendous amount of money over the way that they've been doing it before with the service bureau give better more responsive service to customers and at the same time they did this right before the government required people in this business to use a website in order to provide service out to out to their customers so once they'd saved a bunch of money using web objects they're now making a bunch of money with web objects by selling the application they wrote for all their competitors so they can be compliant so we did we did about 15 million dollars of revenue in the three quarters that we sold last year pretty small potatoes by the overall apple bottom line but analysts who track our field tell us that in the internet application development space we were in fact the market leader we've got this is a little bit old now well over two hundred and seventy-five customers who have licensed web objects to build applications with objects Enterprise we've got over 50 applications deployed on the internet along with the intranet applications that we really can't show off but some of which are even neater and more sophisticated people who bought web objects did it for three basic reasons one is they had a problem they needed to solve they needed to solve it quickly the vice president of marketing said you got to get a website up by the end of the quarter to sell our products or to do a customer care application or to dynamically show today's prices and so the fact that web object says these rapid element tools along with the pre-built objects that use a developer used to extend its functionality gave them a great time to market advantage and they could meet those requirements it's a very flexible system that's easy to maintain unlike competitors in the web space we don't generate code we don't have wizards that go out generate code and then you sort of if you want to do something different have to hack into it so it's hard to maintain as you've seen probably with some of the Rhapsody demonstrations interface builder and so on we have the ability to hook together objects dynamically and customize their behavior by sub classing and extending them we also keep the concept of the user interface very separate from the business logic and the data access layer which provides another layer of maintainability but probably most importantly for most of the customers that have bought live objects so far so that we don't require when we're being part of a solution you to throw away some existing piece of infrastructure sharper image and Dell both kept their order management systems cyber slight so if you saw Ellen and Wiley ordering a pizza had to integrate in a GIS system that they liked that I had never heard of at the time they did it and and certainly wasn't in the requirements for web objects they integrated an Oracle database and the voice response system we let you take advantage of the existing data and applications that you have in your enterprise and don't require you to replace them and and it's it's actually not all that surprising that we're in the web business because when Tim berners-lee wanted to build a system to let scientists CERN collaborate he used what we now know as yellow box in order to build the first browser and the first server so we come a long way from there in the web the web actually went pretty far just as a way of exchanging documents among disparate computers on a network the static HTML model that you know that most of us have seen with home pages and other pages and documents and and that's good but people wanted to use capabilities like CGI's and and writing Perl scripts and so on to be able to extend the behavior of the web by adding simple forms and transactions something that hooks off to a search engine or something that lets you register at a site or tells you how many visitors have come to your page where we see the market going where it really seems to be starting is to go into what we're calling live web applications real first-class applications that happen to use the web as their user interface there are a couple of different ways that people in the market are suggesting that that we can do this one model is it comes from the database vendors with extensions database to web sorts of tools and there's some other folks doing it all the database vendors have these those those certainly have their limits because really everything that you're doing is involved in the database um so you can't integrate multiple databases you can't easily switch databases you can't go out to other forms of user interface you can't integrate see code that you've got lying around you keep your business logic and sequel or the equivalent another model that people have used are by writing plugins and the plug-in based approach really sort of makes you question why these guys are bothering to the web at all because it really is just sort of all the problems of client-server having to do with the cross-platform issue that we're also aware of the fact that these proprietary plugins might not run on all your platforms and you need to upgrade them inversion them and so on so rather than these two approaches what we've taken is an open web technology approach that's independent of browser and the server and operating system that you're running on and the data sources that you're accessing in languages open API is open open open open so web objects is an open development platform that lets you get quickly out with web applications that can integrate integrate enterprise data and applications let me show you how the dis fits into the context of what happens on the web we're familiar with a standard static web model which is that a user in a browser makes a request to a server for some particular URL that grabs out some data some HTML or some maybe a QuickTime or something like that sends it back to the server and I'll wait for a second to model the actual okay Internet there we've got a response back to that model web objects ads this application server so behind the web server we have an application server that's running programs that can access databases can access enterprise applications and can do processing as well as accessing all the multimedia data that's on there and if you need more horsepower you can roll in more servers we handle the load balancing the distribution that's not something that the developer needs to worry about that can handle at deployment time so let's focus in a little bit on the web objects piece and see what's inside there we've got the application server that I mentioned the pre-built application component where and then the rapid application assembly tools the application server is what gives you the scalability and distribution the fact that you can run multiple processes multiple instances of your web objects application across one or multiple servers on the HTTP server if you want to on different servers if you want to on different platforms if you want to means that you as a developer don't need to worry about this when you're building your applications and the Internet in particular allows us to generate loads that we're really unthinkable in the client-server days and stress the kinds of tools and approaches that client-server systems have employed really passed the breaking point we also if you've seen have a dynamic object runtime both in the sense of Java and the objective-c dynamic object runtime that we've linked together with Java which allows us to very flexibly maintain systems add functionality to existing systems and so on and the interoperability with different object models like like korba we also provide applications out-of-the-box one piece the application components out-of-the-box one piece the enterprise object framework is what handles the transparent access to different kinds of data source so use the developer don't need to write sequel you don't need to know exactly how things are stored in the database or have that knowledge reflected in the code so if you change databases or if you change schemas within a database you don't need to change your code you just change the model that's done with a graphical tool we also have the tools that abstract out the framework that abstract out the fact that you have a web user interface HTTP and HTML so there's no dynamic generation of HTML that you need to hand code no state management that you need to worry about you don't need to worry about parsing HTTP requests that's all handled for you we have web objects builder which is a tool that you can use to assemble these components and add your own value added to it it's a graph of if you've seen the interface builder demo earlier it's like that except for the for the web project builder which is an integrated development environment compiler linker debugger source code management and so on and the enterprise object modeler which is the specific piece that drives the model that tells the data access components interface the object framework how they need to generate SQL in order to get and retrieve data basically you model your databases as objects with this tool graphically model relationships among the types of objects and can go from there what really makes your application go is your business logic that fits inside this environment so that's what's running in those web objects server processes now when you actually deploy it we don't require anything at all special on the browser so navigator Internet Explorer links the browser that's in my Newton all work fine with web objects and it uses normal HTTP back to a normal web server whether that's Netscape or iis or apache or web star or whatever other kind of server you have and a half and the way that that works is that there's a little piece of software that we provide we provide in source code form as a matter of fact that you can put next to your server and it's what does the load balancing out to these application instances we've got a version in cgi so that is a sort of lowest common denominator that works essentially everywhere we also have custom adapters for NS API is API and as I said we could be source code so we had a customer do an Apache one web star API is under development by a couple of third parties right now and the web server can run on on any kind of platform this is straight C code so it's been recompiled - you know bsd unix and it can work with with mac OS and other platforms this chart here shows all of the different things that are inside web objects and the point I'm getting to is that web objects and the desktop components that are inside the yellow box really are highly common so we've got the dynamic rub time which is bridged to the Java Virtual Machine and the foundation classes that run on top of that and the distributed objects capability that runs on top of that and the enterprise objects framework that I mentioned the web objects framework which is responsible for the HTML HTTP interaction state management so on we also have the builder the modeler and the project builder tools if we turn that picture around and say well what's in the desktop part of the yellow box that we've been hearing about all day it's it's about the same thing instead of web objects framework we've got the app kit the the user interface piece instead of web objects builder we've got interface builder but it's all on this common core of technology and what that means to you as a developer is that if you write software in this environment is very easy to repurpose it either to the web or to the desktop so it's very easy to take a desktop application written with these yellow box technologies and web enable it or vice versa or to write something that as have done with webobjects Enterprise and openstep Enterprise write an external application and external users can use that uses web objects because of the ubiquity of the web but uses for the internal maintainer x' a desktop user interface based on the desktop pieces of the openstep but to use the same core of software we talked a little bit about the client-server environment and our multi tier capability there when we start out with client-server you know can plus 15 years years ago or so what what we all did was to tier we had a desktop computer which would have some business logic bundled in with a presentation interface handling and would also have a database server which maybe had some business logic that was kept as stored procedures and so this this really sort of goddess in the hot water when we wanted to change the application we needed to do it in such a way that we didn't break the interaction between these two pieces if we wanted to write a different application that used some of the same business logic but had a very different presentation for a different kind of user we need to do very you know careful cutting and pasting wanted to change databases then all of that stored procedure business logic needed to be rolled over or the if you change databases also a lot of the data access logic in a desktop computer would break so so this this wasn't so good so people in the client-server world moved up to you know three tier and entir and you sometimes hear about hyper tier and multi care and lots of cures but but that's best basically the problem that people were trying to solve along the web space a lot of people who are in this sort of application development space say hey look we've got an HTTP server we've got an application server we got a desktop computer we got a database server we're at least four tier this is completely bogus because the HTTP server and the desktop computer aren't really active participants in this game still we're back with business logic and web server and in the database server that have all of the same problems that we have in suture client-server web objects suggests a different approach which is to use multi tier flexible tier computing for the web where the business objects are completely separate from how they're stored in the database and they're completely separate from how they're presented to the user so if as customers who've used this technology in the past if you want to do you want to write a similar application that does something just a little bit different but uses the same functionality even quoting your business objects or you want to pull in another database you want to migrate from a legacy database to to a more modern Oracle or side baser Informix you can do that and none of your business logic which is the core of your code none of that breaks web objects provides a great deal of connectivity both through the data sources native access to Sybase oracle Informix ODBC and through third-party products folks who've extended our platform the ability to access mainframe databases we also have the ability to connect to all of the things that make the web a fun place to to be with multimedia images and sounds and animations and with web objects you can add to the Dynamis 'ti of that by conditionally vending different chalk waves for example depending on what users want or different different quicktime zrs we also have functional integration to Olay automation services to korba objects and as a matter of fact a number of our customers now have graphed or wrapping their main frames as Corbis services so nobody needs to know that their main frames anymore and and nobody has to touch them this makes a lot of sense and it's easy with web objects to integrate in with those legacy systems as I've mentioned and any code that has a compiled interface so that you can be called from C or C++ or two for Java so it's important when thinking about data the data access is not is not all there is to it people talk a lot about getting to data but data is really only interesting insofar as it runs your application insofar as it is something against which the business object that you have acts so data is an input it's like a a customer's credit report by itself isn't interesting if you're an application developer but the business object that contains your policy about based on this credit report am I going to extend credit next time that is interesting those are the pieces that model what your business is and those business objects are really a very valuable asset once you develop them within this environment web objects and as a matter of fact this this whole infrastructure allows you to easily reuse Business Objects across the desktop web Java client interfaces we have customers who are taking the same business objects and vending them out to an application that's completely written in Java running in the browser using i io P to connect into the business objects so it's very flexible you can reuse them across applications and across data sources because they're not tied to the bit data and they're not tied to the user interface they're very flexible and easy to reuse we also then have a model of development that is both objects and component based which means that different people in your organization can build at different levels we have object developers in an organization who are building these core business logic objects that you'll use in order to model your business and can be used across many many applications web objects supports the model of components which as you saw an interface builder are the things that can be up on a pallet to have user interface and behavior wrapped around these Jaques they can do particular things so developers can create pallets of components that they share with other people in the organization on top of these business objects and then different sorts of people can use a tool like web objects builder to assemble these components into a working application and graphical designers also have the option to change the look and feel and appearance or to create the look and feel and appearance of your web objects application by using tools like the cyber studio from go-live which as you just saw will have a web objects editing module into it or by using other tools so if you actually look at what the web object itself is what drives the application it's a it's a piece of software that contains both data like on this dell order a dell page the data about how much memory you want and what operating system you want and what network adapter you want that's associated then with the user interface attributes in the HTML like these pull downs as well as actions methods things that you do when the user wants to do something and those are tied into things like hyperlinks and submit buttons as a developer if you use web objects builder the fact that there are three files for each one of these pages or component is hidden from you but if you want you can also go in and edit these by hand what's really happening behind the scenes is that there is an HTML file that is perfectly normal HTML except that we've added one tag web object which says hey there's something in here that's going to be dynamically generated and or dynamically parsed that script or code which can tell the system what to do when the user presses that add system to Cart button and references that the data that's associated with the in this case the model number and the edges options number and then the declaration file which maps the HTML template together with the scripture code the bottom line here is because we've separated out the code from the presentation to the user from the file that associates those together you as a developer have a great deal of flexibility and ease of maintenance it's not like you've got a huge HTML file that has a bunch of script dumped in it so if you want to change the HTML file you need to work your way through all of that web objects also provides the developer a choice of languages he or she can develop in a variety of languages much of the application code typically is done by web objects customers in a scripting language we've got a language called web script that looks like objective-c or it looks like JavaScript where you can put application logic in if you want to try something out for size you can just make the change hit reload in your browser and see the effects so it's a very high productivity quick turnaround environment if you're concerned about performance or if you need to link in to of a particular business object you need to link into compiled code many people use Java or Objective C for their business objects again as I said the objective-c and the Java runtimes have been bridged so you can work in one or the other or both and intermix that with scripting languages one of our partners a company called tiptop has built a Perl language that interfaces to this so you can also use Perl as your scripting language of choice if you want to and if you have another compiled language you can call two functions or methods or libraries from within those compiled languages right in line in your web objects application so the developer has a real choice of out of languages and in most cases our developers have chosen to mix and match languages when creating one particular site using the languages with the feature that's best suited a particular piece of the application that's being worked on a web user interface web user interface is is okay it's it's sort of mainframe like right because you you get a page of data and you fill a bunch of stuff out and you hit submit or something that's maybe a little bit more descriptively named and off goes information to a web server which in our case will then talk to an application server which will generate a response and send back a completely new page that works well for some things for other things like user input validation that's pretty heavyweight and it rules out all together a bunch of really interactive user interfaces so wouldn't it be nice if instead of taking this approach we could bend out not just HTML but also components that users could work with on the browser and have a more interactive user experience well that's exactly what we've done by integrating client-side Java into web objects say for example the developer wants to put a slider in that represents a query the user is going to do against the database and wants to show the result in a graph that comes back from the from the database we provide a component called an applic controller it's a Java applet that sort of sits lurks in the background on your java page and when you have your Java applets or third-party Java applets whatever in ones that we provide on the page like that slider when the user lets up on the slider it lets the controller know that it's ready to have an action invoked on the server just as if these are hit a submit button and it's the controller's job to package up all the information that comes from the components that are on the page send them over the wire as HTTP it effectively pretends it's the browser and at that point the web application server does what it would ordinarily do come up with a response but this time instead of having to redisplay the whole page the response goes back to the components that have changed State so object synchronization happens over there and in our case here the users graph gets updated so with the user side I talked for a long time about that but what the user saw was that they move this slider LED up and a graph changed based on a database query and maybe some computations to update so much more interactive user experience what we've just announced I'm I'm really excited about is that web objects is a platform for the development community now I've heard a lot since coming over to Apple from next that hey this web object stuff is really cool but the developer community can't afford to buy $25,000 deployment licenses so you know we we hope you can do something about that well we did something about that we have given you the opportunity within this yellow box environment to write standalone web applications to web enable your desktop applications that you're building or that other people build to create brand-new services that you've end over the internet or to extend the web objects platform itself as the folks at tip-top and as the folks at go live have done and we're targeting it you specifically by repricing the basic web objects capability that is in yellow box to free so you can view all of this and not pay us any deployment runtime along with the rest of yellow box whether you're deploying on Rhapsody whether you're deploying on Windows NT or Solaris or hp-ux just go and do it and we have also announced that we will be selling the suite of tools that you need to develop these applications at a price that's competitive with the sorts of prices that you're used to paying for development tools that run on a Macintosh package so so I think that we've got a solution there that will help really enable a whole new class of integrated web and best applications within the yellowbox platform now we're also pushing ahead with a successful web objects enterprise product web objects enterprise has this unlimited scalability that we talked about it has the ability to access enterprise data the capability to for example go after mainframes or Oracle or Sybase or Informix databases external ODBC databases that we talked about is not included in the free deployment version at that point you come to us and license that but we have also tiered the pricing for that to make it easier for our enterprise customers to get started with that kind of highly enterprise enabled capability we've got a new workgroup price that starts at just 7,500 dollars as well as divisional and unlimited pricing we also have pricing for developer tools that's come down from $5,000 to $14.99 in this space so we'll make it easier for more people to get started doing more of these great web objects applications with that web objects is completely cross-platform technology we hope that you're really getting bored of hearing cross-platform during this conference we we really want you to know that we get it and this is something that is fundamentally extremely important to us and that we think is very important to the success of this as a platform and and in the sprawl as a company so you can develop those development tools today run on Windows NT as well as open step for Mach and we have announced that we will be supporting those on Rhapsody within the yellow box I'm sure that's that's no surprise solaris hp-ux our deployment only platforms they're not systems that we typically see as often on developers desktops so they just run the server portion of the yellow box which allows web objects deployment to run on top of them but again just like the rest of it it's a recompile onto the specific platform that you want to go to and and you're moving ahead what we want to do with web objects as we move into the future is to continue to work with standards and market leaders we don't want to invent everything at Apple we're good at inventing stuff but we also really want to take advantage of all of the things that the markets doing and the power that that brings so we're going to try and be as uh Nera ghen as we can be to work with standards and market leaders and partners to continue to flesh out our whole product offering we will continue to offer a choice of languages Java being and extremely important one of those but also ensure that development can can be leveraged in the future for example we have a lot of customers who with web objects Enterprise who really want to develop in Java they wouldn't talk to us wouldn't buy our product if we didn't have Java support but they're not ready to deploy that big mission-critical project that they've got to do next month in Java or maybe they've got a train of investment in other languages we'll by the way that we bridge the objective-c and in Java Runtime of we've allowed developers to subclass all of their objects on on that side on the objective-c side in Java and vice versa bottom line what that means is the developers who still choose not to develop in Java yet are going to be able to take advantage of 100% of the development that they do when they decide to move to Java and and and so that they can develop in continents knowing that they're going to be able to have a smooth path to Java we also want to be able to support a broader market of developers both in terms of the pricing as you've seen but also by making our products easier to use and to get started with that was something that was important for our enterprise customers and we were marching hard on before this direction now that we also are part of the yellowbox developer platform it's that much more important that we make it as easy as possible for people to take advantage of all of the power that's in web objects so that's a strong development thrust we want to give customers more to start with to continue to build where it makes sense reusable components application component where that they can just drop into their applications and get going with and we're also looking to the developer community to both in horizontal and vertical areas build up components that folks can use and we want to have support for increasing flexibility in terms of the deployment of the application not just with HTML on the browser not just with desktop applications not just with individual applets and components on the browser as we describe the client-side component story but also with a true Java client/server so what we're going to be doing in 97 and just a little bit into 1998 is to ship web objects 3-1 that should ship in a couple of weeks again that's you have a pre-release version of that in your bag or you will once you turn that coupon in tomorrow and get the hot off the presses web objects 3-1 pre-release CDs this summer we're going to be shipping web objects 3-5 late quite late summer which will have enhanced ease of use we've created a capability are creating a capability called mentors which are different from Wizards you know Wizards come and ask you some questions and then they spew out some code then they leave and you're stuck with the mess with that's that's were the negative way to put it but but a mentor on the other hand sticks with an application developer as he or she is writing an application and working on the application it's not hit and run kind of a thing and I'm really looking forward to showing that off to you in the near future Rhapsody support and more pre-built components to get people started simple example we found out that almost all of our developers had login panels and they had some kind of authentication management through their applications to figure out who was using it was it just a normal user or is that somebody with some more authority to see some specific things so why not fold that into the frame so so we're doing that in early 1998 we will deliver webobjects 4.0 which will have increased direction I mean increased progress for ease of use and for additional pre-built components and platform support and all the other things that were working on but also will be making a strong thrust and a true 100% Java client/server environment and again I'm very very much looking forward to being able to tell you more about that and show that office very exciting work so we've got a bunch of paths for learning more about web objects there are a lot of sessions today and tomorrow I wanted to tell you about and sort of help you decide what might make sense next in this hall is web objects frameworks which gives you an overview to the web objects framework itself that is the piece that does the dynamic generation of HTML and the state management and the parsing so that'll drill you down into some detail and what's really inside there and what you as a developer need to do to take advantage of it session 410 using web objects builder we'll go through some fairly extended demos of building real applications using web objects builder so you can get a sense for what that's like in a very practical sense data access and web objects will drill down on the enterprise objects framework and how it works with the web objects framework to allow you to develop database enabled applications with web objects web objects client technology speaks to the Java and the also a new ability that we have in web objects 3.1 which is the ability to in partnership with Adobe to deliver dynamic PDF forms rather than generating HTML with web objects 3.1 you can fill in forms dynamically that look exactly like they will on a printed page that looked like exactly like what you want them to so that's that's a new capability there we'll be showing that off along with some some really neat partner solutions by the folks at a is that leverage our client-side JavaScript and tricks about how to tune your application for performance how to plan for its deployment how to manage 20 application instance processes running on three multiprocessor machines and so on all of the things that that really hit the road when you start deploying major applications like the Dell site or like the Disney site session for 14 talks about the places where use the developer have business opportunities around web objects and for 17 which is later tonight brings some folks on stage who have actually developed with objects applications and they will share their experiences with you and in what worked and and what was hard and and what they'd like to see and and what they think about all of this and very importantly on Thursday morning as a feedback session where we get to hear from you after you've seen this stuff what you think about it and what you think we need to be doing and we're very interested in hearing your thoughts so it's 8:30 which is kind of early I apologize for that but but I really hope you can make that so so I'm in marketing so I got to close you know I got to try and close for something call to action so please attend the rebbe objects tracks that seem to make sense for you pick up your CD turn in that coupon and get it apologize that we didn't get it into the packages but it was it was worth the wait trust me check out the omni group website which has a mailing list for web objects developers there's a real wealth of information there hats off to the folks at Omni for doing that and and get developing some applications so that's the end of my session what I'd like to do is to open the floor up to questions there are microphones on either side of the hall so if you could please go up to them so not only can we all hear you but you'll be recorded for posterity thanks we have about 15 minutes for questions yes sorry ask me first I already have a legacy system that has a 40 database that I'm using just a CGI's formed people enter data and it goes on the database and that's about it but if you have this list of different databases that your stuff will work with and they never say 40 specifically in there is 40 will this work with 40 that's that's a really good question I mean I think it's fair to say that from our historical customer base sort of large enterprises doing large-scale database access 40 was not something that popped up very often so it's not not a high not a high hit point high pressure point now as part of Apple obviously they really would like to work with them so we don't have any announcements on that score yet we don't have anything out of the box that works with 40 unless there's an ODBC driver for them but but we would like to make that happen Katie could you go over the prices again and specifically upgrades are they the same tool price or some variant or free upgrades for like for existing customers or okay the most important price is free that's the what you need to pay us to deploy an application that you've built with web objects or other pieces of the yellow boxes you've heard today we have not announced pricing on the developer tools that go along with that but it will be something that that I believe you all will think is very reasonable if you bought tools on a Mac platform before or on a Windows platform the for the web objects enterprise product the beginning level of deployment that we have starts at $7,500 that's that's for a single server the tools for any level of deployment but for any developer developing a web objects enterprise product is $14.99 and that includes all of the enterprise database capability okay if you're if you're building a web objects enterprise application for every developer that's building those applications we want $1,499 and then to deploy it when you're actually running the application and people are using it the price for that starts at 7,500 yeah for that server it was Jill Roos hello since you're on the pricing area is there going to be an academic discount like there was with the next arrangement we have not come to the finish the details on that but I expect since we're part of Apple that that's something along those lines that will happen but we don't have any specifics to announce right now we we think that makes sense can web objects do anything for me in terms of main brain connectivity 30 to 70 sessions in conjunction with one of one of our development partners if you've got a mainframe that has no other way you know client library no you know no Corbeau wrapper no ODBC driver no I mean it's the mainframe application you want to access that is 30 to 70 there's a product called the legacy objects framework which is an adapter to the enterprise objects framework and works with that a number of our customers have deployed mainframe enabled applications with that product and another product from a company called connections the first ones from a company called irid and have had great luck with that so yes absolutely in conjunction with the development community another one one more question was do you have any plans for providing deployment prospects on SGI servers no additional platform support announcements at this time you differentiate between web objects enterprise and the base web objects it's easy for me to understand on the enterprise side you have the you know big database connectivity whether it's oracle sybase ODBC you explain them what does the basic product give you if you don't have that connectivity just differentiate between the two it gives you that the two differences between the thing that we include for free in the platform and the thing that we charge relatively speaking a lot of money for the higher value product is the scalability that is the ability to distribute your at the load across your application that only comes with the enterprise product as well as the ability to access the enterprise Moose's but if you have an application that you've written that's a desktop application and you want to vend a sort of pure web service or you do your own data management or you do computations or you want to use a particular set of local databases that that we hope to include with yellow box at that point then the base product works so most of what people do dynamically on the web the base product will work for things that are current enterprise customers are looking for in terms of large scale and connectivity this is the enterprise product anything else okay oh yeah you can be supporting say taking credit cards electronic commerce that kind of thing getting money into it main basically that's that's a good question what about support for electronic commerce we have a number of our customers who have built commerce sites Disney sharper image our two that come to mind and there there are a number of pieces to those so one piece is how do you actually take the credit card order make sure that's right thing interface with an order management system those pieces we have left to the third-party market and so companies like VeriFone and open market and cyber cash and other players in that space because of web objects open nature it's been quite easy for our customers to integrate with those and take the order one piece is well what about the security you know about somebody sending a credit card over than that is web objects support SSL the answer is well not we don't have to get involved in in that piece of the security because the browser and the server the web server already do that and we don't get in the middle of their conversation so whatever they do just works what if you're concerned about security behind the firewall between the server and the web object application server well in that case it's straightforward to add capability to the adapter that as I said the source code for and add in the ability to use Secure Sockets rather than regular sockets works fine it does there we go did that answer the question anything else what about case studies or anything like that are they available or would that be in this session did you describe for deployment yeah I would definitely there are a number of if you're interested in case studies of web objects at work here at the forum I would encourage you to to talk or to go to the soldiers in the web war presentation that's a good place for there's some case studies and some of our own testing analysis for performance and scalability in the deployment and performance section and I would also encourage you to talk with your Apple enterprise sales rep who can give you something that's particularly focused to what you're trying to do you know pretty good attitude to dates about Gloria and IO be sure say something is about Corbin IUP excellent question those business objects in a web objects application can talk out to Corbis services and can get their information or data or can be filled in by bike or by objects that reside on another server that can happen in one of two ways if you happen to write your business objects in Java then you don't need anything from us to make that happen you can use third-party like vision ixora Java to korva bridges to to hook that up the other model is that if you have developed an objective-c we have in alpha right now but available to you the ability to do an objective-c IDL knapping Objective C to korban mapping so for example BellSouth is deployed in application we're in they've written their business objects in objective-c and they get populated from from a corpus source and that application they don't happen to use the enterprise objects framework they use this corba hook in because that's their data is in a corporate source going the other way out to the client typically with web objects people do HTML based applications but we've had a few customers who've wanted to have completely interactive Java applications as a matter of fact they've built that themselves with with other tools so the question is how to hook in the business objects from web objects that have the state management and the ability to interact with HTML and the ability to get populated from databases how to hook those up into the java application may have run in the browser well with the Netscape IOP plug-in they've been able to go I IOP on the browser out to the web objects application server we're using like again the Visio genex or they've been able to hook into the Business Objects of it written in Java so can go from our application server out to the client or from our application server to request services from another server using korva and an IO P and that works whether you use Java or Objective C anything else probably needed three more microphones in this room sorry sir you talked about being able to put wrappers around your current object be able to ear open stuff objects you'd be able to use them with web objects is there any facility like that for next step objects are you have to get the open stuff first we've got to get help and stuff first okay is there any transition tools available to go from X step to yellow box yes there are there are tools to help you get from from the old we made some changes in the api's when we establish the open step standard so folks who developed under next step use some different conventions in their applications and when we went to a portable standard based model when we did that we also provided some tools for making that transition and we also have a white paper on that but I believe is available on the next comm website I encourage you to look at that I guess you say that in early 98 you have 100 percent Java client/server environment do you mean RMI by that or is that available now through one point one um there there should be no reason why if you've got a business object that you've written in Java within the web objects application server it's just a completely normal Java object there's no funniness and it doesn't even subclass you know one of our objects a normal normal object so you should be able to use RMI right now with that I'm not aware of anybody who's done that only those people have talked about doing it but I mean I'd be a great thing to see so if any of you want to take your just home run running right away do that and let me know that we great but no further announcements on the pure java client and then server thing right now great well it looks like we are out of time and out of questions at the same time so that worked really well I appreciate your spending this time with us encourage you go to the other tracks and take those CDs and develop great stuff thanks [Applause] [Music] you