An Architect's View

17 responses so far ↓

• 1 Dale Fraser // Oct 12, 2007 at 3:50 PM

  There is a strong uptake of Mac's for developers and the general community. In sites I've been involved in over the years, things have really changed, from being 90% ie on 99% windows, to this.
  
  Have a look at some of the stats from learncf.com
  http://learncf.com/stats.cfm

• 2 TJ Downes // Oct 12, 2007 at 4:36 PM

  This rocks! Thanks Sean!

• 3 Yves // Oct 12, 2007 at 5:05 PM

  Now if CF 8 could be supported on the new Mac OSX Leopard in a decent timeframe !!

• 4 Sean Corfield // Oct 12, 2007 at 5:17 PM

  @Yves, you can't expect official support for an operating system that hadn't been released when CF8 shipped. It will be interesting to see if Apple do anything in Leopard to prevent CF8 installing and running tho'... I'm running CF8 on the Java 6 Developer Preview with no problems (unsupported by Adobe since Java 5 was official at the time of CF8's launch).

• 5 dave // Oct 12, 2007 at 10:25 PM

  macworld also mentioned it under "up and coming products" a few months back.

• 6 James R. Taylor // Oct 12, 2007 at 10:49 PM

  @Yves, if it's anything like what happened when Apple switched to Intel I fully expect Adobe to support Leopard... in CF9.

• 7 Sean Corfield // Oct 12, 2007 at 11:07 PM

  @James, to be fair Apple's switch to Intel was pretty major in terms of what software vendors needed to do to add support.

• 8 James R. Taylor // Oct 13, 2007 at 12:30 AM

  @Sean, Yeah, it was pretty major, especially for all of those vendors whose software wasn't running on a JVM. (grin)

• 9 Yves // Oct 13, 2007 at 10:52 AM

  We have the Apple ADC builds of Leopard to test our applications ahead of launch and I can tell you now that CF8 does not start on Leopard. Some Java errors popup when launching CF8. In the latest Leopard builds the default JVM is still 1.5.
  
  @Sean, James: Sean you are right but I hope that Adobe will fix issues in a dot release, not in CF9 !!!
  
  By the way Leopard is itself a dot release. Adobe should not wait for a complete product life cycle to adapt to a dot release. Does Adobe support OSX or OSX.4 ?? :-)

• 10 sal // Oct 17, 2007 at 12:58 PM

  ooh man! I'm soo stoked for Leopard!! Ya got it pre-ordered Sean??

• 11 Sean Corfield // Oct 18, 2007 at 8:57 PM

  I never pre-order Apple O/S's... I wait until other people have upgraded and I have a better idea of what compatibility issues I'll hit. My development system is too important to risk an upgrade without knowing more about the gotchas... Just like I can't believe how many people upgraded to Vista and then were surprised that they hit compatibility issues...

• 12 Paul Whitelock // Oct 21, 2007 at 1:52 PM

  In light of the comment by Yves that "CF8 does not start on Leopard" it's interesting that MacNN reported the following on 30 May when the CF8 beta was released:
  
  "The software supports Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and includes support for Apache (v1.3 and v2.0) as well as JRun 4."
  
  http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/05/30/coldfusion.8.beta.posted/

• 13 Sean Corfield // Oct 21, 2007 at 3:44 PM

  @Paul, well, we'll have to see what folks discover when they start upgrading next week... :)
  

• 14 Yves // Oct 22, 2007 at 12:20 PM

  @Paul
  
  Despite this announcement in MacNN the official Coldfusion 8 System Requirements http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/systemreqs/ only list 10.4.x as Mac supported platform.
  
  I hope that people will test before updating their development machines running CF8 or else they are in for a big surprise !! unless Apple fixed something in the last builds we did not get as part of the ADC subscription.
  
  Please note that this problem could be related more to JRun than CF8 itself !!
  
  I hope that Abode will be quick to address this issue. Leopard is a big release and the people here that played with the ADC builds are frantic !!
  
  Here we are down to 2 applications (that we use on a daily basis) that refuse to run on Leopard.... including CF8 :-(
  
  

• 15 Sean Corfield // Oct 22, 2007 at 2:16 PM

  @Yves, yes, there's no way Leopard could be "supported" by any company until the official builds are released because even testing against a pre-release build wouldn't guarantee that software would work on the final version.
  
  I don't know why anyone expects existing software to all magically work and be supported on a new operating system that wasn't released when the existing software came out. It *cannot* be supported out of the gate.
  
  Often, a company will test software against a pre-release build, find a bug and notify the O/S company who may promise to fix it and then, lo and behold, the O/S comes out and the bug isn't fixed.
  
  As for ColdFusion 8, you need to remember that not many people are installing it *in production* on OS X so it isn't generating a lot of revenue for Adobe. The free Developer Edition is great but you can't be surprised by any delay in fixing it if Leopard breaks it - where's the revenue impact for Adobe? I'm sure their advice would be: don't upgrade your development machine unless you are sure all your software will run and, by the way, you're on an unsupported O/S! That's perfectly reasonable in my opinion.

• 16 Yves // Oct 22, 2007 at 5:22 PM

  @Sean
  
  Sean I totally understand your position on this subject !!
  
  I worked on PCs for 15 years before jumping to the Mac camp a few years ago.
  
  I have to admit that the expectations for new OS support is quite different on the Mac side !! Maybe it comes from its creative roots where supporting "what's in fast" was very fashion and supporting the latest and greatest was very important.
  
  Now that Macs are used more and more for business critical applications "we" must learn to be more patient and expect delays in OS support for complex applications like CF, database engines, etc..
  
  We have some native Cocoa apps here and converting them was a cinch. The OS x ADC builds bugs are listed and easy understand. With the last few builds the bugs affected very specific areas of the OS. Companies can always wait for the few bugs to be ironed out and GM to finalize their development. This way we could have compatible versions in weeks... not months :-)
  
  
  
  
  

• 17 Sean Corfield // Oct 22, 2007 at 5:37 PM

  @Yves, well, I come from the Unix world where I'm used to having almost no software certified on new O/S releases until many, many months after release. The real issue for commercial software developers (or perhaps I should say enterprise-level commercial software companies) is that certification - to make a platform supported - takes a lot of effort because the implications are huge in terms of support costs (calls, re-certifying when issuing bug fixes / patches / updates etc).
  
  For small companies that produce low-volume software, it's easy to play catch up.
  
  See also this discussion about trying to create commercial, supported software on Linux:
  
  http://www.swaroopch.com/archives/2007/10/22/closed-for-business/
  

Leave a Comment