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My second job was working for a small WebObjects consultancy in 2008. They developed bespoke line-of-business applications for small companies. Having the compl

by xmodem 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  It was the 90s. (Not OPs story, but WebObjects availability)
- xmodem 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  It predates .NET for about 10 years.

by xmodem 3y ago

twoodfin 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
It was the 90s. (Not OPs story, but WebObjects availability)
xmodem 3y ago
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 3y ago
It predates .NET for about 10 years.