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Test Drive NeXT’s WebObjects in Revolutionary Dodge Virtual Showroom (1995)
- teddyuk 10y agoI have to use WebObjects at work, it might have been good in its time but it is awful now. The biggest problem is that we aren't allowed (political bs) use the open source fork so can't use things like a shared session :(
- nsxwolf 10y agoIs it still maintained in any way? How old is it? This sounds crazy.
- sitharus 10y agoWebObjects hasn't been updated for 8 years or so now. There's an open source fork maintained by some people who rely on it, it's improved a lot since Apple's last release.
- sigzero 10y agoIn case people want to check it out (I am not involved in the project or use): https://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/WEB/Home https://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/WEB/Home
- protomyth 10y agoDid you use the Objective-C or Java version? I loved the Objective-C version and dearly miss EOF.
- mwcampbell 10y agoAre you talking about the ObjC version of WebObjects, or the later Java version? Can you explain more about shared sessions and the problem they solve?
- Theodores 10y ago> Steven P. Jobs Who?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- protomyth 10y agoEnterprise and Italian business suits[1] require a bit more formality than a consumer company. 1) I learned from an article about Mr. Jobs at the time that I would never be able to wear and Italian cut business suit. The weird things Business Week once included in their articles.
- pjmlp 10y agoMany consulting companies oriented at Fortune 500 costumers, e.g. McKinsey, have internal manuals describing those formalities to the littlest detail.
- itomato 10y agoSteve demoed WebObjects and this Dodge virtual showroom at a Microsoft Conference in 96: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNXogpwvAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goNXogpwvAk
- mwcampbell 10y ago> And you have to know nothing about HTML to use WebObjects. How well did that work out in practice? Did WebObjects make heavy use of server-side in-memory sessions (which would require sticky sessions in a modern load-balanced setup)? Could it do things like registering event handlers to let you submit data back to the server or even go to another part of the app without having to know about URLs and HTML forms?
- cmg 10y agoIIRC, WebObjects had an application called WebObjects Builder that was essentially a WYSIWYG HTML editor that was the web equivalent of Cocoa's Interface Builder. You'd drag & drop UI elements and hook them up to data objects, which would generate Java classes in the background.
- Scramblejams 10y agoI hate web dev, and I find myself wishing that there were a modern equivalent of what you've described. Is there one that doesn't suck?
- mwcampbell 10y agoVaadin [1] might be close, if you don't mind the JVM on the server side. [1]: https://vaadin.com/introduction https://vaadin.com/introduction
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- cmrdporcupine 10y agoI attended a NeXT WebObjects demo/training session in Toronto in late 1996, or early 1997. It was quite impressive for its time, but the licensing cost was absolutely ridiculous. They overpriced it such that by the time you were done with an Oracle or whatever license, only a Very Large Corp would be interested in using it, so they inevitably missed the wave of .com companies getting themselves out there. Per server or per-core licensing of some kind I believe, too.
- protomyth 10y agoThey dropped the price ($50,000 to $499), but frankly it was the Apple acquisition (or the NeXT takeover of Apple if you prefer) that really ended it. All the enterprise related stuff withered on the vine.
- itomato 10y agoApple Enterprise kept on keeping on for a bit after the takeover. If there were companies willing to pay (anything) for such a transitional technology, they would have made a deal.
- protomyth 10y agoThey pretty much stopped responding to e-mail and phone calls in 1997, so maybe it was still going for Wall Street, but it was pretty hard on everyone else.
- mustacheemperor 10y agoThe price drop was after the merger, in fact. They started bundling it with Server for free some time after that too, but I think the sun had mostly set by then already if I'm not mistaken.
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoThe price drop was quite significantly after the merger. I am not sure of the timeline but it probably wasn't until 2000 or so. And by that time J2EE had taken the market it would have had.
- Diederich 10y agoI can confirm that this technology is still in critical use at a very large company that you would be familiar with the name of. And everybody there hates it, and has hated it for a long, long time, but it works Well Enough, and it would be exceedingly difficult to remove it.
- ams6110 10y agoThe Dell store? I thought that Microsoft funded a conversion to ASP because they didn't want a top-tier Windows reseller running their web store on Unix.
- gwu78 10y agoI can confirm that company is Apple.
- fleshweasel 10y agoI'm pretty sure this is why the Apple online store needs to be taken down for them to add new products.
- boulos 10y agoI think the best section in this announcement is about being object oriented ("based on object technology"): > WebObjects is based on object technology allowing developers to gain all the benefits of objects; reusability, maintainability, and scalability.
- pmarreck 10y ago> "We see the Web as an explosive force in corporate America today" This was actually not as obvious in 1995.
- based2 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry