Whoa. Back up a moment.
I had to support Openstep Enterprise for Windows at NeXT so let me make this clear:
Openstep Enterprise that morphed into YellowBox is Objective-C. It is not Java.
Knowing that QuickTime for Tiger has been re-written in Cocoa (i.e., Objective-C and probably ObjC++) the interesting idea for this long delay could be directed to the return of WebObjects for Objective-C that got shelved in the 4.x days.
If I were still working at Apple Enterprise Software (AES) I wouldn't be writing this but it makes no sense that Apple continue to invest funds into WebObjects Java when it really hasn't made a dent into the Dynamic AppServer market that it once did when NeXT lead the market and innovation.
I do know several highly talented Cocoa developers now work at Apple and some are in the WOF Team. My best guess would be that Apple would release WOF 6 for Cocoa and that would be a unified support for ObjC/Java/ObjC++ and leverage all the recent improvements to the Cocoa frameworks.
If that happens (one can dream) then it would mean a fresh version of Enterprise Object Frameworks (EOF) would be included and Apple would finally be admitting it is serious about Enterprise Web Services and data centers.
One can hope.
Regarding Windows XP support I would think they'd put it into legacy mode and encourage, through discounts, folks to work in a purely UNIX environment on OS X.
We never had a huge demand for WOF on NT/2k/XP like we thought and I would think that Linux support would be more interesting to Apple via Deployment strategies.
GregA said:
With 5.2 released years back for Windows 2000 SP3 and using a derivative of Cocoa - and with 5.3 accessing new frameworks in OS X, I wonder if WebObjects 5.3 will be released for Windows XP?
If there is any effect on cocoa development for Windows XP (even if this is only something used by Apple apps - such as WebObjects, iTunes/Quicktime, Appleworks, etc. If Cocoa for Windows works largely, any Apple Cocoa app is easily ported (as in the Openstep days).