
Steve Jobs Introduces WebObjects [video] (1996) - lpsz
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-with-Bob-Muglia-and-Steve-Jobs/
======
lpsz
At the 23:50 mark the slides follow the familiar model seen in Apple media
events today.

The approach: in 3-4 concluding slides, concisely reiterate key selling
points, compatibility, price, and the availability timeline. I've always found
this approach to be particularly effective -- I'm highly likely to
unambiguously remember these most important bits given that they are presented
last.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I wouldn't say that's exclusive to Apple or something they came up with -
sounds like sales 101 to me.

------
whizzkid
What is fascinating to me was seeing how passionate he was on a product like
it was his life goal while talking, and a few years later totally focused on
another completely different thing.

It is impressive to me since I am having hard time to let go my little hobby
projects and start another one, while he is doing it on much higher level with
the same passion. Respect on that.

~~~
quux
He actually wasn't that passionate about enterprise stuff, but could clearly
make it look like he was in important events like this. I think at this time,
he was getting tired of NeXT and was looking to sell the company so he could
focus on Pixar, or something like that. He was really tired of the computer
business. I remember seeing an interview with him from around the same time
period where the interviewer asked him to talk about NeXT's enterprise stuff
and the response was something like "You don't really want to hear about that
right? It's not really that interesting."

~~~
scj
That was the 1995 Cringley interview. About 54 minutes in. "You don't really
want to hear about NeXT, do you?" was the exact statement. And he claims that
innovation in the computer industry is in software within seconds.

I think Jobs' response was more about disarming the perceived courtesy. While
polite to ask Jobs about what he was doing with NeXT in 1995, the highlight of
his career (and general interest) would be with Apple and to a lesser degree,
Pixar.

Kind of like talking to a rock legend about their latest album, when most
people care about their breakout period.

------
danso
What a trip to see Steve Jobs not only try to sell something pre-iPod-success,
but something as technical and relatively pedestrian as a web framework...And
he does it well, without the use of a primetime-polished slideshow or
catchphrases.

The one visual that sticks out to me in this video: the silhouettes of people
arriving mid-speech and leaving early.

~~~
nemo
"relatively pedestrian as a web framework"

In early '96 having a RAD MVC web framework backed by an ORM was really pretty
groundbreaking (even moving codebases relatively seamlessly between an
OpenStep desktop app and WO was possible), though yeah, this was Jobs going
after the Enterprise audience rather than consumer electronics, very different
vibe.

------
kalleboo
At the end you can see a glimpse of the UI for Concurrence, the presentation
software Steve Jobs used up until Apple created Keynote.

[http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP...](http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdPartySoftware/PersonalProductivity/Concurrence/Concurrence.html)

Found this story about the first time Steve Jobs moved from using physical
slides to Concurrence running on a NeXT
[http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/92...](http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/92.3/92.3.Fall.How-
To1.html)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Sounds like the Enterprise Objects Framework was an ORM?

Yep!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_Objects_Framework)

Apparently it provided the basis for Core Data, too.

~~~
threeseed
It was actually one of the first and heavily inspired the beginnings of
Hibernate.

And yes it is the basis of Core Data.

------
takahisah
The QA is really interesting. Most of the questions I felt he handled well and
showed that he has knowledge of the domain. Two questions in particular stood
out:

Q: How can I, as a developer, get my hands on the expensive software suite?

A: Come talk to us. We can accommodate developers who are willing.

This may have been some early input for him to think about sdks and the
philosophy of providing developers with tools early on.

Q: What is your view of transactions on the web?

A: We don't think it's a technology problem. It's more of a social/business
problem

He was clearly wrong on this one, with the advent of cutting edge technology
companies like PayPal and Stripe that followed.

~~~
X-Istence
I don't see how he was wrong.

Transactions on the web exist, there are improvements to the UI but it is a
social problem (I am afraid of my credit card being stolen) and business
problem (Don't worry, trust us we won't let anything bad happen to your credit
card).

~~~
takahisah
He made it sound as though it is technologically trivial, as long as society
and businesses would get behind the movement. I don't think that is the case
from a security standpoint and also designing an api that would allow for
widespread adoption.

~~~
threeseed
> He made it sound as though it is technologically trivial

This is a guy who built three operating systems and countless revolutionary
apps under his watch. Many of which given the constraints back in the day
would've been incredibly complex.

By comparison web transactions IS trivial.

------
lucaspottersky
So, about the 10x programmer myth, productivity etc...

Steve mentions that it took about 3 weeks with 3 programmers to build this
app. The tools & technologies have evolved and today we can build this kind of
thing with a tiny fraction of this effort...

To me that's the kind of thing that _really_ matters after all: evolving
technology & tools, not the "10x programmer myth", or those "how to be more
productive" tutorials. The tech evolution has a much bigger impact on
productivity than those individual productivity recipees.

~~~
ovi256
Those programmers were arguably 10x or 100x programmers, not run-of-the-mill.
They made a choice to work on new technology, solving a hard problem. And then
put in the effort, probably with little handholding, and managing the
uncertainty.

These are traits not found in the average or even median programmer.

------
cowmix
He's obviously in pain here, selling business software on NT of all platforms.

The timing of this video is funny because soon after he went back to Apple to
recapture the glory which is consumer electronics.

~~~
pjmlp
You are talking about the days when Apple was about to close its doors after
the Copland failed experiment and NT was picking up steam against UNIX based
workstations.

In 1996 it appeared NT was going to conquer the IT workstation desktops.

NeXT was also going multi-platform with OpenStep.

~~~
rbanffy
It must have been painful for him to give up on NeXT's beautiful hardware. To
see his beautiful software running on lesser computers probably did hurt.

~~~
pjmlp
My final project assignment at the university was to port a particle
simulation engine from NeXT/Objective-C to Windows/C++.

The professor had his Cube disconnected on his office, piled with other stuff.
No one believed NeXT would survive.

~~~
rbanffy
> No one believed NeXT would survive.

And, surprisingly, now every Mac is, essentially, a NeXT.

------
heyts
I would really like to know how cutting-edge this was at the time. It seems
incredible to me how little has changed in how we make dynamic web
applications.

~~~
wodev
WebObjects is still available and in use by a small but active circle today.

[http://wocommunity.org](http://wocommunity.org)

It moved from Objective-C to Java under Apple. Apple discontinued shipping it
with OS X Server Snow Leopard, but the frameworks are still available/free.
The community picked up where Apple left off with the open source Project
WOnder.

It is a full stack development framework. Enterprise Objects Framework(EOF) is
the ORM or Model layer like Cayenne or Hibernate. WebObject components are the
front end View layer like you might get from Tapestry.

I have yet to find a web framework that rivals its Controller layer,
DirectToWeb (D2W). D2W sits between the Model and the View. It can generate
Views automatically using information from the model and with customizable
direction from a rule system. It also provides controller actions with
customizable callbacks.

Out of the box, WebObjects can reverse engineer your database, constructing a
full model of it, and D2W can then construct a full blown
Create/Read/Update/Delete interface to it with no coding required. If you
don't have a database, you build a model and WebObjects can generate the SQL
necessary to create the database for you as well.

It's still pretty amazing, despite being treated like an ugly step child by
Apple. It still powers the billion dollar iTunes store as well AFAIK.

~~~
grecy
I was a WebObjects Developer for 2 years from 2007-2009, the company I worked
for still uses it for their massive health-care-related web apps. It's a
really cool framwork to use, as it incorporates so many aspects that are
usually provided by different libraries.

The developer community is small, but very active. Every year they hold a
"World of Web Objects (WOWO)" conference right around WWDC in San Fran.

Project Wonder has done amazing work to bring Ajax and many other "Web 2.0"
features to WO.

It does still power the iTunes store, and the Apple Store. A friend of mine
that worked at our sister company landed a job with Apple working on the
iTunes store, and AFAIK, he's still there doing that today.

~~~
threeseed
I used to work at Apple many years ago in a past life but IIRC:

Project Wonder was definitely at the core of iTunes Store. They had your
typical monolithic web application and used most of the WebObjects
technologies.

The Apple Store was different. They had dozens/hundreds of micro services
which used WebObjects only in the front i.e. to handle request/response and
routing. They may have even switched it out by now.

~~~
grecy
Interesting. I remember reading the Project Wonder mailing lists and the
creators and maintainers of it were certain that Wonder wasn't being used by
Apple for anything "public facing", but they strongly suggested it was used a
lot internally.

I've always wanted to work for Apple... care to share any thoughts?

~~~
vajrabum
Same advice given to me a few years back. If you're good and want to work at
Apple doing web development, apply. They're hiring.

------
applecore
A couple of tangentially related discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715128)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1968611)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
For anyone confused: What Steve pronounces as Olé/Olay is OLE.

~~~
nailer
There was some weird 90s conversion of abbreviations to acronyms. One suck.com
writer was called 'Duke of URL' pronounced like 'Duke of Earl'

~~~
philwelch
Acronyms, traditionally, are by definition pronounceable as words. Things like
"U.S.A." where you only pronounce the letters are called initialisms.

~~~
nailer
> Acronyms, traditionally, are by definition pronounceable as words.

Yes, I'm aware of that, hence stating 'There was some weird 90s conversion of
abbreviations to acronyms' in the comment you're replying to.

------
based2
[http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2003/09/excellent-
discourse...](http://tapestryjava.blogspot.com/2003/09/excellent-discourse-on-
webobjects-and.html)

[https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tapestry-
users/200...](https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/tapestry-
users/200309.mbox/%3C3F6B3ED6.1020707@ognl.org%3E)

[http://vschart.com/compare/apache-
tapestry/vs/webobjects](http://vschart.com/compare/apache-
tapestry/vs/webobjects)

[http://tapestry.apache.org/](http://tapestry.apache.org/)

------
a_rahmanshah
YouTube -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX25rxOY8Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaX25rxOY8Q)

------
lukev
It's remarkable to see a presentation presenting programmatic construction of
HTML as a novel concept.

~~~
biafra
This was 1996. WebObjects was far ahead of anything I used at the time. I
started using WO and EOF in 1999 and it had stuff like scaffolding (D2W) at
that time. When did RoR introduce this?

~~~
pjmlp
That is the thing with RoR.

There were frameworks before it that offered similar functionality, but since
the web was growing up only a few developers got to see them.

------
dangerboysteve
Man can Steve sell and make things look good. I used Webobjects for some
projects back in the day.

~~~
pjmlp
I read somewhere that WebObjects were in part the inspiration for JEE.

Somehow the OpenStep efforts got sidestep by making Oak into Java and
everything else got ramped down.

I wonder how it would have been if Sun had kept with OpenStep instead.

~~~
philippeback
The spirit of this lives here:
[http://seaside.st/about](http://seaside.st/about)

And it is an awesome framework.

ReactJs is going the same kind of components based thing these days. Nothing
so new, except for where the component is running...

~~~
innguest
Also of note is that Seaside uses the concept of continuations to manage
multi-page flow which is a very fitting abstraction for this problem, and that
most languages can't afford to do. That means they can code complex behavior
as if the line between client and server did not exist.

~~~
philippeback
Kind of, but in the 3.x series, please note that continuations are now
completely optional.

As continuations are quite memory heavy, the new way allows for lighter
sessions.

------
CptMauli
One interesting thing for me was, to see how slow the server interaction
really was.

------
ankurpatel
"We love the Internet Explorer browser very much" \- Steve (6:58 minutes)

~~~
stffndtz
\- said no apple employee ever.

~~~
nchelluri
I am not entirely sure about this.

While I don't have personal experience, from what I've read, IE on Mac was a
fair bit different from IE on Windows. IE 5 for Mac, released in 2000, used
something called the Tasman engine:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29)

> At the time of its release, Tasman was seen as the layout engine with the
> best support for web standards such as HTML and CSS.

Also from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Inter...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Internet_Explorer_5_Macintosh_Edition):

> The Macintosh Edition introduced a new rendering engine called Tasman that
> was designed to be more compliant with emerging W3C standards such as HTML
> 4.0, CSS Level 1, DOM Level 1, and ECMAScript.

I vaguely recall reading somewhere that back while IE for Windows was giving
web developers prematurely grey hair, IE for Mac was a much nicer browser and
much more comfortable to support as a development target. I think it ended up
getting less time/thought/effort from Microsoft eventually. Also, Safari was
released in 2003 (beta in January, default browser in OS X 10.3 Panther, in
October).

~~~
lostgame
IE for Mac was actually fairly nice, especially in the early days of OSX. I
kinda miss that candy blue icon in my dock.

------
mwcampbell
Interesting that he dismissed interpreted languages for non-trivial code, as
if it were obvious that the performance wouldn't be good enough. But wasn't
Perl already being used for CGI scripts in 1996?

~~~
kevinchen
I'm sure you could make it work, but back then fewer engineer-hours had gone
into making interpreted languages fast, and hardware was slower. It was also
common to run a website on one machine.

Tangentially related:
[https://twitter.com/GregB/status/27244912213](https://twitter.com/GregB/status/27244912213)

"> @spolsky: Digg: 200MM page views, 500 servers. Stack Overflow: 60MM page
views, 5 servers. What am I missing? << That's the PHP factor"

------
state
"Giving your credit card to someone over the phone is far less secure than
giving it to someone over the web." [27:53]

------
dtanl
Great job by Steve Jobs!

