[HN Gopher] WebObjects Overview (2001) [pdf]
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WebObjects Overview (2001) [pdf]
Author : kaladin-jasnah
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-06-10 20:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (developer.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (developer.apple.com)
| jason_slack wrote:
| I worked at a university and we used WedObjects for a lot of
| project. I still believe that it could be around today and
| competing with the best "stacks" available. Limiting factors
| would be price and deployment options.
|
| But alas, it wasn't viewed in the light by everyone and other
| "stacks" became more popular.
| mhd wrote:
| Ah, WebObjects, one of the sad "dead ends" of web tech, not
| because of being technically obsolete, but because the world
| moved to different stacks...
|
| I'd put ColdFusion, AolServer and Seaside in the same category.
| coldcode wrote:
| I did WO/EO for several years until 2001 including the USPS
| Postmaster app, and it was incredibly productive. This was
| before JS took over everything, but I can't ever recall being
| able to do so many client/server web apps with so little
| effort. Sure the tooling was sometimes lame (ProjectBuilder was
| a precursor to Xcode) but Objective-C at the time was amazing
| compared to all other web programming languages. I think WO was
| far easier to develop in than today's complex web stack, but
| clearly serving the simpler need of that time. It wouldn't be
| useful today.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Its spirit lives on Jakarta EE and Spring.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| ColdFusion, may it remain buried for good. I was forced to use
| it in the 90's and was struck by how much more work it was to
| get something sensible up and running with it compared to using
| Perl. I finally got them to ditch it and life was good - or at
| least better.
| j45 wrote:
| WebObjects ran the website of the nhl for a long time
|
| It's a tad ironic to see todays modern tad rediscovering the
| use of presentation templates much like WebObjects, ColdFusion
| and others quietly did for a long time and were ostracized for.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| My mind was blown when I've seen WebObjects in 2001. We were
| using XML/XSLT at that time to render web pages and plain
| servlets.
| xmodem wrote:
| My second job was working for a small WebObjects consultancy in
| 2008. They developed bespoke line-of-business applications for
| small companies. Having the complete stack - from the HTML
| templating through to the ORM - provided by one vendor and
| designed to work together made development faster than anything
| I've worked with since.
|
| It's a shame the cost was too high for too long, and even when
| Apple made it free, they never open sourced it.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Steve _loved_ WebObjects. Trawl around YouTube and you can find
| some of his enthusiastic demos from the late NeXT era. In one,
| IIRC, he builds an entire web store from scratch in about 15
| minutes.
|
| But his message on returning to Apple was all about focus.
| Apple was not going to try to be a web middleware company, so
| they used the tech where they could benefit from it internally
| (and did so for a loooong time) and that was that.
|
| Late '90s Steve didn't only put bullets in the heads of
| technologies (Newton, OpenDoc) that he didn't like.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Powerbuilder was (I guess it still exists) sort of that way.
| Not as sophisticated as WebObjects but for throwing together
| CRUD screens for business functions it was pretty good. One way
| to do things, you didn't really have to stop and think "how am
| I going to build this." Sort of like framing a house with
| dimensional lumber.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > They developed bespoke line-of-business applications for
| small companies. Having the complete stack - from the HTML
| templating through to the ORM - provided by one vendor and
| designed to work together made development faster than anything
| I've worked with since.
|
| How is that different then .Net?
| jonhohle wrote:
| It was the 90s.
|
| (Not OPs story, but WebObjects availability)
| xmodem wrote:
| I worked with .NET as well around the same time, and in my
| opinion it never quite achieved the same level of integration
| as WebObjects.
|
| It also had quite a high price-of-entry until Visual Studio
| Express editions were released in 2005.
|
| I don't have any experience with modern .NET/MVC specifically
| but modern approaches in general shy away from the decisions
| that made WebObjects so good because they do tend to hit
| nasty scalability limits.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It predates .NET for about 10 years.
| pininja wrote:
| I wasn't even a programmer back in 2001, but flipping through
| this book shows how certain concepts endure, even as technology
| evolves. It's a bit like the snake eating its tail - even as we
| move on, we find ourselves revisiting tried approaches.
| pjmlp wrote:
| WebObjects and Distributed Objects Everywhere, are two
| Objective-C projects that eventually influenced how JEE came to
| be, yet another connection between Java and its Objective-C
| influences.
| ksec wrote:
| Some say it is still better than today's Ruby Rails / Laravel in
| terms of productivity. And if it was open sourced at the time the
| world would have been very different.
|
| All we know is, it's called WebObject.
| miniwark wrote:
| I am not sure why this stuff is posted now, but as someone who
| still need to use WebObjects at work because of a legacy product,
| we use instead Project Wonder:
|
| https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder
|
| https://wiki.wocommunity.org/
|
| Because Wonder is more or less patched & maintained while
| WebObjects is in abandonware state since 2008 (and officially
| since 2016).
| rileyphone wrote:
| Fun fact: WebObjects was the most expensive product Apple has
| ever sold, at $50000. It managed to keep NeXT alive after the
| hardware business collapsed
| dbbk wrote:
| Adjusted for inflation perhaps. But the last Intel Mac Pro
| definitely went above that.
| Someone wrote:
| At $53,799, not much, according to https://www.theverge.com/c
| ircuitbreaker/2019/12/10/21003636/...
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(page generated 2023-06-11 23:01 UTC)