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Article:
  Results from the 2004 ONJava Reader Survey
Subject:   Mac dev vs. deploy
Date:   2004-05-20 12:27:51
From:   tpherndon
You wrote: "It's also interesting to note Mac OS X pulling development and deployment numbers several times the platform's supposed market share, although it is puzzling that a greater percent of development happens on a Mac than deployment."


This trend should not be puzzling; just ask one of your Mac-using compatriots. If a business is deploying Java apps running on some variation of Unix on big tin, is it going to be easier to mimic the deployment environment by developing that app on a Unix variant, or on Windows?


Taking it further, how many respondents work in an all-Unix or all-Linux environment? Probably not that many. For integration into a mixed computing environment, OS X is hard to beat. You have MS Office, you have bash.


On top of that, it is generally much easier to configure and use a laptop with OS X than with Linux or one of the *BSDs. Where pay = time spent coding, having a laptop that "just works" is more important than spending the time necessary to configure Linux, et al. to work well on that laptop.


In short, Macs have the best of both worlds, and expediency often triumphs over idealism.
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  • Chris Adamson photo re: Mac dev vs. deploy
    2004-05-24 06:08:49  Chris Adamson [Reply | View]

    You don't need to sell your editors on the value of Macs, as a check of our author bio's will show. :-)



    But here's something to think about. We said that Mac Java development numbers were "several times the platform's supposed market share". That's the part your discussion bolsters: that Macs are nice, they have Office and bash, etc. What we said was "puzzling" was that there were more people saying that they were developing Java on a Mac than people saying they were developing Java for the Mac.



    So how does that work? Some possibilities:




    • Developer writes web app on Mac, deploys to Linux, Solaris, etc. Suggests Macs aren't as popular as app servers

    • Developer writes client-side (AWT, Swing, or SWT) app on Mac, deploys to Windows, Linux, etc. and not Mac. Does this seriously happen? Amazingly, yes. In fact, I did exactly this at a company with a stringent Windows-only release policy (and no, I wasn't happy about it).

    • Developers write client-side apps on various platforms, and don't target or support Mac. Why not?



    So that's what we find puzzling. Of these hypotheses (and there may be more... please talkback!), I find the first the most plausible.



    -Chris

    • re: Mac dev vs. deploy
      2004-05-25 03:35:47  jwenting [Reply | View]

      People write FOR the platform the customer uses.
      They write ON the platform they (or their employer) chooses.

      If Macs are chosen by some companies whose customers use Windows you're writing on a Mac for Windows.
      Apple would love that, it's been the other way around for decades :)

      Personally I don't use a Mac though I might purchase a Mac laptop at some stage for photoprocessing.
      We develop on Windows, deploy on a mix of Unix flavours as web applications. We could just replace the Windows boxes with Macs but why bother as they work well and are cheap (plus we DO sell them as well, we're a systems integrator and IBM reseller as well as creating software).

      So we develop ON Windows FOR AIX (and SCO and Linux).