Le Club Macintosh de Montrİal Publication: InterFace Issue: March 1992 Author: John Markle Series: NeXTdirections Title: Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, Corporate Canada ------------------------------------ NeXTdirections Reflections on programming the NeXT computer by John Vincent Markle Wake Up And Smell The Coffee, Corporate Canada NeXT Computer, Inc. recently revamped its entire corporate strategy to emphasize the fact that NeXT users can rapidly createand customize mission-critical applications that perform tasks, according to Steve Jobs, five to ten times faster than on other platforms. The key to this programming revolution is the object-oriented NeXTstep operating system, including the Interface Builder, the Application Kit of reusable and extensible objects, and Display PostScript. The primary language used is Objective C, an elegant union of C and SmallTalk, although C++ and other languages are also supported. Booz·Allen & Hamilton Inc. has just released a comparative study of NeXTstep versus other development environments. This study found that 8 out of 10 developers and programmmers surveyed ranked NeXTstep higher than other environments they had used (Sun, Macintosh, MS DOS) in all major areas: development environment completeness, application quality, application maintainability, and development time. The average NeXTstep application was reported to take approximately half the time to develop compared to similar applications written on other platforms; respondents also reported that programmers wrote 83% fewer lines of code using NeXTstep. These types of performance improvements help to recover the cost of the NeXT machines in record time and to increase programmer productivity to record highs. Custom applications can be made to seamlessly integrate and interact with many of the 260 software products now available for the NeXT. In fact, a single NeXT machine can run custom software, commercial software, PC and X applications and emulate a 3270 terminal, all at the same time, while allowing full cut-and-paste among them. As well, with the upcoming release of NeXTstep 3.0, Next computers will be able to read both DOS and Macintosh floppy-disks, and to interoperate as full Novell or AppleShare clients, thereby allowing access using the built-in Ethernet to file servers, printers and other peripherals on DOS or Macintosh networks. Now, these are what I call true competitive advantages! Other features of NeXTstep 3.0 are worth mentioning from a corporate standpoint. The DBKit will provide a format-independent facility for accessing, manipulating and searching relational databases (including Sybase and Oracle), non-relational databases, flat files, and real-time data feeds. The PhoneKit will allow a NeXT computer to place or receive telephone calls, to generate and decode touch-tone signals, and to play and record voice over the telephone line, thereby enabling a full-featured voice-mail system. The ISDN-Kit will allow remote NeXT computers with ISDN to have real-time, Internet-like access to the corporate network environment at about four times the speeds available today with 9600-baud analog modems. In addition, language interchange within a custom application will be simplified, as will be the incorporation of hypertext help facilities, and the new graphical debugger will shorten development time. If you're not impressed as yet, then consider this possibility. Richard Crandall, NeXT's chief scientist, has written a free program called Zilla, dubbed the "community supercomputer", for which he was awarded the 1991 Computerworld Smithsonian Award in the Science Category. Zilla can bring supercomputer benefits to non-expert users in any field of application where a large task can be broken down into a number of smaller tasks. Zilla is designed to automatically move a task around a NeXT network to wherever there is free computer time, backing away from any given machine when it detects that someone is using it. A recent study of workstations found that, on average, only 2 to 3 percent of their power is actually used; Zilla therefore represents a practical way to harness the 97 percent of these resources which is currently being wasted. In fact, a network of 100 NeXT computers can reach Cray-like supercomputer speeds on some problems, but costs less than 10 percent as much to purchase, and requires far less electricity and maintenance to operate. NeXT has used Zilla to perform successful numerical analyses in the 100-1000 megaflop region, already making four numerical discoveries that are important in the world of advanced mathematics. In summary, if you don't want to get left in the dust, start building custom applications now as many corporations in the American, European and Asian markets already have. You can begin simply by slipping a NeXT computer into your existing Unix, DOS or Macintosh network. However, if internal restrictions don't allow you to bring a non-IBM-compatible machine into your corporate environment, then begin by using NeXTstep 3.0 on a souped-up Intel '486 machine. If you decide to wait two or three years until the IBM-Apple alliance brings you comparable object-oriented technology, you'll be only that much further behind and considerably less competitive as a result.