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Apple stops support for WebObjects
- jrochkind1 10y agoI was a WebObjects developer back in the early 2000s. It was great for it's time. It's architecture is really quite similar to Rails, I've often wondered if dhh was exposed to it, or came up with Rails architecture separately from shared influences.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y agoOn the heels of the "Rails is old and gray" discussions that have popped up here recently, I have to wonder: at what point is it necessary to accept a given framework is past its prime, even if it is still being used? If the abandoned project is open-sourced and the community can take care of it from there, great, but what about developers who can't spare extra labor to fix bugs, vulnerabilities, etc. I'm just a little concerned about how rapidly things are changing and being forgotten in the process. You can't blame a for-profit company for abandoning a project that drags on growth, but how will future historians piece together the lives in our time when operating systems and web app frameworks are abandoned and forgotten? Edit: I am reminded of a statement from an Economist article on this issue: http://www.economist.com/node/21553445 http://www.economist.com/node/21553445
- mindcrime 10y agoI'm just a little concerned about how rapidly things are changing and being forgotten in the process. You can't blame a for-profit company for abandoning a project that drags on growth, but how will future historians piece together the lives in our time when operating systems and web app frameworks are abandoned and forgotten? From what I've seen, technologies very rarely ever actually die. Sure, the trend-of-the-day changes, and this industry, which is WAY too fashion-driven, starts to assume that the "old stuff" is dead, but it never is. Or almost never. Look around a bit, and you'll find plenty of people still building apps in FORTRAN, COBOL, Ada, RPG, Pascal, Delphi, and all sorts of other languages that most people think of as relics. Granted, hardware is a little bit of a different story - for example, you'll probably have some difficulty finding Token Ring or ARCnet networking kit these days. But even there, I'm sure you can find a few crusty S/38 boxes or VAXen or something, out there plugging away (probably connected via Token Ring or ARCnet too!) I won't dispute that there's a point where something new comes along that offers legitimate advantages, and that there's a time to start moving away from certain technologies for one reason or another. But I'll also argue that a lot of us are way too quick to write off "old" technologies, and are prone to re-inventing the wheel and/or failing to learn from the lessons of history.
- cloudjacker 10y agoAnd on the 6th day, Apple created the Internet in their own image and likeness.
- bonaldi 10y agoAnd yet the iTunes and App Stores are both built with it, as is a chunk of Apple Music. It's a pity it's been neglected so long; there were some nice touches in there (bindings, EOF, some of the tooling when it wasn't crashing) that I'd love to see modern versions of.
- protomyth 10y agoI seriously missed EOF from the NeXTSTEP days. WebObjects wasn't the same after the Java "upgrade". I suppose a modern version in Swift would be interesting, but the web has changed in the intervening years.
- jrochkind1 10y agoRails ActiveRecord has _most_ of what EOF had. It comes close, a couple decades later.
- threeseed 10y agoI still liked EOF Java but still there does remain a spiritual successor: http://cayenne.apache.org http://cayenne.apache.org
- jasonjei 10y agoDoes that mean Cupertino has already rewritten iTunes and App Store and Apple Online Store? I'm guessing they're going to keep the WebObjects style URLs for compatibility with old versions of iTunes and App Store.
- 0x0 10y agoAt least https://itunesconnect.apple.com https://itunesconnect.apple.com appears to have been rewritten in AngularJS. The https://developer.apple.com/ https://developer.apple.com/ portal also got a new UI not too long ago.
- ErikAugust 10y ago
- 0x0 10y agoNot surprising at all, given the rise and fall of Java as a first class citizen on OSX (remember how first-party Java support was touted as a huge feature in the first OSX releases) and then also OSX Server (which, once the OS of choice for running file, mail, web servers on Xserves, has been relegated to be an appstore .app that mostly seems to be useful for running xcode ios build bots on mac minis)
- coldtea 10y ago>Not surprising at all, given the rise and fall of Java as a first class citizen on OSX And not only on OSX -- generally the rise and fall of Java. In late nineties "Java Applets" (+ the web plugin) were supposed to go big. Never happened. Then there was always the promise of Java on the consumer desktop. Never happened either [1]. Java on the enterprise desktop also didn't fare that well. As for startups and smaller companies, the mostly go with Ruby/RoR, Python, Node, Go, PHP, etc. Nowadays it's just mainly Java on the enterprise server. [1] Yeah, I know you can name 5 somewhat successful desktop Java apps. I doubt you can name 50 though, and that's the whole point.
- matt_morgan 10y agoI was there, at that announcement in 1996. It was the only time I saw Steve Jobs speak. His cult was pretty much not a cult then, and it was pretty hard to understand what he was talking about, but of course a short time afterward we were all talking about and building db-backed websites (and my career was based on it for a long time). The prescience was always there.
- mlu 10y agoFor me personally, that's sad and good news at the same time. After school, I did a 3-year training in a company and basically learned all my programming skills from using WebObjects in enterprise applications. Somehow it felt ancient already back then (around 2007). But I learned to like it a lot. Nowadays there are much more modern and mostly streamlined web frameworks...in contrast to the huge bulk of components WebObjects brought with it. Now, I wonder what my old company will do now. As far as I know, they're still using it.
- boucher 10y agoI'm pretty shocked CNN would write an article about WebObjects. The news itself is barely news at all though.
- mrcwinn 10y agoIt's true. Knowing CNN, I'm surprised they didn't make the headline: "New technologies Trump Apple"
- mwfunk 10y agoI was thinking the same thing. WebObjects has been on life support for many, many years now. What's shocking is that it had any level of external support 10 years ago, not that that support is ending now. It reads like CNN was framing it as another Apple doom-and-gloom, whatever-will-they-do-without-Steve story, especially with the claim that it was one of his "favorite projects" [?], and OMG now they're cancelling it, this is proof that it's not the same company anymore, etc. Its importance to NeXT in the '90s was more as a life raft than as something they thought would sweep the tech world and make billions of dollars for them. It was something Steve was hoping NeXT could pivot to instead of going out of business (NeXT was circling the drain in the mid-'90s, just not as dramatically as Apple was). It came out after NeXT had left the hardware business, after it became clear that going software-only wasn't going to save them, and in the early days of the dotcom bubble, so it would've made a lot of sense to try to hitch their wagon to up-and-coming web technologies. This was before Apple paid a lot of money to get taken over by NeXT, and the rest is history! The life raft never caught on in a huge way (although it obviously found some valuable niches to fill), and after a couple more years it became clear that a life raft was no longer needed, and may have even become a distraction.
- danso 10y agoI like watching that 1996 WebObjects presentation [0] just to see how technically detailed Jobs could get, in a time before Apple could just dominate the consumer attention span with the slick, adjective-heavy presentations they have today. He's taking questions from the audience, people are walking around in the middle of the presentation. He may not have been a programmer but he knew how to talk about the details, not just talk about the big and beautiful ideas. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNXogpwvAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNXogpwvAk
- electrum 10y agoNote that this is from early 1996, when Steve Jobs was CEO of NeXT. Apple didn't acquire NeXT until nearly a year later.
- cm2187 10y agoIt is something always amusing to see an old video explaining to a selection of experts, "here is what dynamic html is and what you could do with it" when you know what it has become since. I particularly like the part where the submit button on a web page fires up an excel session on the server, which calculates a price and returns it in the html! I wonder why we don't do more of that today!
- DasIch 10y agoIt could be interesting to take spreadsheets and compile them into functions. You'd get a DSL with an incredibly powerful IDE and interpreter for development basically for free.
- gherkin0 10y agoNot to mention one that non-developers already know and are productive in.
- Pxtl 10y agoGood point. There's no reason we couldn't have Excel as a headless DLL and spreadsheets compiled into a nice useful bytecode except that the software itself is a complete trainwreck of legacy issues.
- ataylor284_ 10y agoAh, WebObjects. In a lot of ways, it was the Ruby on Rails of it's day. It was one of the first integrated, opinionated platforms with all the tools to build web sites backed by a database. Architecturally, it was years ahead of the first Java application server platforms; the persistence model so much better than the first iteration of enterprise Java Beans. Its major drawback, in the early days at least, was that it was designed as an Objective-C framework. By the time I started using it (around 2000), Java was supported, but it was clearly an afterthought and you dealt with a buggy bridge to ObjC components and Objective-C-isms all over.
- jrochkind1 10y agoInteresting, I must have been using it just a year or two after you -- by the time I was using it (in Java), I don't even remember if the Java was still just a bridge to ObjC or not (at some point I think they rewrote the core in Java?), but there were no problems with buggy bridge to ObjC components, it worked fine. There were sometimes frustrations with the architecture, but buggy ObjC bridge wasn't one of them. (the statefulness of the architecture wasn't a good fit for the web as it was then; although interestingly was a similar approach to what React does, but actually exposed in public URLs, which was kind of disastrous).
- ErikAugust 10y agoWeird how the article opens to a huge video interviewing a guy who did acid with Jobs. Kind of lame, really.
- vbezhenar 10y agoIs there any modern web framework for Objective C? Ideally integrated with other Apple technologies like CoreData.
- based2 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry