Mac OS Rhapsody Architectural Diagram

Details about the "blue box" are described in the Mac OS Compatibility on Rhapsody White Paper.

Apple's next generation OS, Rhapsody, aims to provide Apple with industry leading Internet and multimedia capabilities and give Macintosh customers a smooth upgrade path to next generation computing. Main features include:

Advanced Mac Look and Feel

Rhapsody expects to include an evolution of the Mac OS appearance, combining the best of Apple and NeXT user interface technology to provide an industry-leading user experience that will be familiar to today's Macintosh customers and exciting to new users.

OPENSTEP based Application Programming Interface (API)

Rhapsody aims to deliver preemptive multitasking, protected memory and symmetric multiprocessing - giving customers and developers a robust, next generation platform. Rhapsody should also offer software developers a rich set of new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) from which to develop new classes of software products that highlight the differentiation of the Mac platform. These API's are based on NeXT Software Inc.'s market-leading OPENSTEP development environment. This area of the OS is refered to in some materials as "The Yellow Box" in the Rhapsody Architecture diagram.

Java VM

It is planned to fully integrate Java into Rhapsody - with Java Libraries and a Java Virtual Machine (VM), giving Apple market-leading Java capabilities. It is Apple's intention to make both Mac OS and Rhapsody preeminent development and delivery platforms for Java applications.

Mac OS Compatibility

Rhapsody aims to support today's software through a Mac OS compatibility environment. This environment is planned to be a complete native implementation of the Mac OS hosted on the next generation OS infrastructure provided by Rhapsody. This is not a software "emulation" layer. Instead Mac OS will be ported to the advanced Rhapsody base. This area of the OS is refered to in some materials as "The Blue Box" in the Rhapsody Architecture diagram.

Core OS

A modern kernel provides a next-generation high performance Input/Output (IO) architecture, file system, messaging and scheduling between applications, and networking.

PowerPC Platform Hardware

Apple's OS plans are underpinned by a hardware strategy that continues to take advantage of PowerPC performance. It is planned that Rhapsody will be optimized for PowerPC hardware.