Macintosh Programmer's Workshop or MPW, is a software development environment created by Apple Computer for early Macintosh developers. It was one of the primary tools for building applications for classic Mac OS systems running on 68k processors.
Description
MPW provided a shell-like environment (similar to Unix) which included Pascal, C and C++ compilers. The Power Mac Debugger was not integrated into MPW like most IDEs of today but the language compilers supported the symbolic debugging information file format used by the debugger.
History
MPW was initially released in 1986 as a commercial product. During the transition from 68k to PowerPC processors in the 1990s, many developers preferred using CodeWarrior to build classic applications, at which point MPW was made available for free.
Deprecation
MPW was deprecated with the release of Xcode in 2003 for Mac OS X development. MPW could be used to develop Mac OS X applications, but only as Carbon builds for PowerPC processors. Intel binaries and the Cocoa API are not supported by MPW. Apple has since officially discontinued further development of MPW and its website.
References
- The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop by Dan Allen, Dr. Dobbs. 1988.
- The Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (PDF), by Richard J. Meyers and Jeff W. Parrish, IEEE Software'. 1988-05.
External links
- Macintosh Programmer's Workshop at Apple Developer Support (archived 2011-05-14, 2001-01-24)
- MPW Version 3.0: General Information
- MPW Version 3.5 Download & Updates (mirrored from Apple FTP)
- MPW Command Reference at the Centre for Computing History
- MPW at the Free Pascal Wiki
- Macintosh Programmer's Workshop at Wikipedia
