So, WWDC09, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, is over, and i’m sitting in my room at the excellent Hotel Monaco getting ready to leave San Francisco.

For every conference i go to, i plan to blog more extensively about it, but of course that never happens, because there’s just too much good stuff going on throughout the week to find the time to sit down and write about it; WWDC has been no different.

I know most people following WWDC from afar only see the keynote on monday, but of course that is only the start of a full week of info straight from the firehose, and – while fun – pales in comparisson to the real meat of the conference.

This year, there has been lots of exciting news from the developer tools front. Xcode, the development IDE for both Mac and iPhone, is getting vastly expanded, with things such as deep integration of the Clang Static Analyzer (which admittedly i had been playing with for a month now, so it was not brand new for me, this week) and a new and vastly better Clang-LLVM based compiler to replace GCC (which still is the default, though). And that’s just the tip of the eisberg. And the rest of the tool suite, such as Instruments, is seeing significant improvements as well.

Due to the work i do at RemObjects, i always find myself in some sort of a “meta-developer” position at conferences like these. While most attendees see, say, new improvements in Instruments and think “that’s great, how can that help me write apps?”, i think “great, how can we leverage this to help our customers write their apps?”.

And i think there’s great potential here for deeper integration of RemObjects SDK and Data Abstract with tools such as Instruments, to make your life easier (and the same goes for GCD).

In addition to the tool chain, there’s also lots of good stuff happening in the OS and libraries, to benefit developers. Of course this is all largely under NDA, so i cannot say too much, but just take Grand Central Dispatch, for instance.

While GCD was already announced (not in the public keynote, but to developers) at last year’s WWDC, this week went into much more detail, and it’s amazing to see just at what level of both the OS and its applications, but also the developer APIs, GCD is being employed. Having a great technology as GCD made available is one thing (and the Parallel Framework on .NET offers something comparable), but seeing how virtually every of the OS’s APIs has been revised to make use of it, and seeing – first hand – the sort of performance improvements Apple has been able to get out of the technology by consistently applying it to all of their code as well, is mind blowing.

With this, and the great enhancements to the entire tool chain, i feel once again ensured that this is a great platform (or actually, two great platforms) to invest in.

And to think the entire tool chain, from Xcode to all the professional tools it comes with, comes free with the system (remember that, the text time someone wields the Apple Tax myth).

In any case, i should start to pack and catch my flight. It’s been a great week of learning and meeting great people, and i, for one, already can’t wait for WWDC 2010…

yours
marc hoffman
Chief Architect

ps: a couple of great food recommendations in San Francisco:

  • OSHA Thai Restaurant on 2nd, between Howard and Mission. Awesome food.
  • John’s Grill on Ellis, between Stockton and Powell. Home of the Maltese Falcon and great steaks and seafood