Section 1.5. Rhapsody

1.5. Rhapsody

At the 1997 World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple demonstrated an early build of Rhapsody, a version of NEXTSTEP that ran on Macintosh hardware. With NeXT's experience porting the system to multiple hardware architectures, it was easy enough for Apple to get a build up and running on a single Mac model in time for the conference. The development community was invigorated as an ambitious project plan was announced that would supposedly lead to a release in 1998 of a new Mac OS for the PowerPC and Intel platforms.

As part of the project plan, three major components were announced: the Yellow Box , which would run OpenStep-based applications on top of Rhapsody; the Blue Box , which would run a future version of the classic Mac OS as a Rhapsody process; and the Red Box , which would allow OpenStep applications to run on top of Windows with a simple recompile.

Rhapsody brought the integration of the following technologies into the current Mac OS X:

Classic

With the outgrowth of the Blue Box, Classic allows older Mac applications to run unmodified under the new operating system. Essentially an operating system running within a process, it doesn't confer all the advantages of a protected-memory preemptive system to the applications running within it. If an application crashes inside Classic, it can corrupt any other applications also running in Classic. However, Classic allows the old and new operating systems to run at once with the same screen, mouse, and a modicum of cross-platform application utility. It's not a perfect solution, but it allows users to continue using their older Mac OS applications as they migrate to the new system.

Java ™

From the beginning, the Rhapsody team made it a priority to implement good Java support on the platform. This support would allow Java applications and applets to run and operate without modification. As well, a layer of functionalityknown as the Java Bridge was implemented, allowing Java and Objective-C to work together. With this functionality, Cocoa applications can be built using Java.

Several problems arose that would keep Rhapsody from ever seeing the light of day as a consumer system. The first problem was getting Rhapsody to run on Apple's entire product line. Each model of Macintosh was very different from other models, and clever engineering hacks had been put into place over time in earlier versions of the Mac OS so it would run on all Macs at the time (including PowerPC - and 680x0 -based Macs). This variation of hardware made it harder to port the Mac OS, as each new Mac model required its own port of the OS. This led to the reduction in the number of older Macs that would support the new OS as well as to the introduction of many changes to the hardware platform to ease the marriage of software and hardware.

The second major problem to face Rhapsody was the lack of commitment by the major Mac software vendors, such as Adobe and Microsoft, to rewrite their products using the Objective-C language and the frameworks derived from OpenStep. Without a complete rewrite, their applications were doomed to live as second-class citizens in the new OS by running in the Blue Box (that is, Classic mode). It became clear to Apple that without the support of the major software vendors shipping first-class applications, the new OS would not succeed. Apple rethought its strategy and decided to postpone the new OS as a consumer system. This delay gave Apple more time to make its next-generation OS run on more hardware as well as to develop a compatibility layer that would make it easier for older Mac software to be ported to run on the new system. This layer, called Carbon , was introduced at WWDC 1998 along with the rest of the plan for Mac OS X development after Rhapsody.

Even though Rhapsody wasn't widely released, it wasn't a failure. It represented an important phase of the transition of the old NeXT-based operating system into something that could be the next generation of the Mac OS. Without Rhapsody, all that followed could not have happened. In fact, the major distinction between Rhapsody and Mac OS X is the name change and the integration of Carbon.