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Ah, 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

Ah, 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 ago
Interesting, 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).