Alternative Development Environments

Many alternative web development environments can run under Tiger, including Apple's own WebObjects. Personally, I have a thing for open source products, but depending on your needs, PHP or Perl might not be appropriate.

WebObjects, for example, is a Java-based development environment that includes RAD tools, distributed application logic and load handling, and a steep learning curve. WebObjects is used to deploy large-scale applications and requires a decent knowledge of the Tiger object model to begin programming. WebObjects comes with a reasonably high price tag outside the range of smaller groups. On the plus side, it is widely recognized as a superior web application server and has won numerous awards in the enterprise marketplace (http://www.apple.com/webobjects/).

Java Server Pages (JSP) is a fast-growing application development solution that leverages the cross-platform nature of Java. Like WebObjects, JSP requires knowledge of the Java programming language and has a similarly steep learning curve. A big advantage to JSP is that it is a supported server platform in software packages such as Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX—enabling graphical development of web applications. In addition, the JBoss (http://www.jboss.org/) application server is available as a custom install with the Tiger developer tools, enabling you to get started with JSP right away. See http://developer.apple.com/internet/java/enterprisejava.html for information on getting started with JBoss on Tiger.