
Apple stops support for WebObjects - secondary
http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/04/technology/steve-jobs-apple-webobjects/index.html
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danso
I 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)

~~~
cm2187
It 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
It 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.

~~~
cm2187
You have server side excel engines like spreadsheetgear. But my comment was
ironic. I am not really suggesting it is a good idea.

But I like the idea of converting an Excel logic to a DLL automatically. It's
non trivial as Excel allows to do some pretty messy things. As soon as someone
uses OFFSET or INDIRECT, all bets are off in term of what the spreadsheet may
do.

~~~
pedasmith
you can also use Excel services architecture: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/office/ms582023.asp...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/office/ms582023.aspx)

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ataylor284_
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
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).

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matt_morgan
I 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.

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0x0
Not 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
> _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.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Based on adoption rates I would say Java applets were very successful. One
area were Java applets were still actively used until very recently was in
online banking, where it was used for secure OTP entry. I'm sure there are
still some that use it.

As a technology, it was fairly clear even in the late nineties that Java was a
bad fit for the web.

~~~
X-Istence
Very recently being when?

I don't remember anytime where I've used a Java Applet on any single banking
site.

~~~
krylon
I Germany, the web site of the German equivalent of the IRS uses a Java applet
to do the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung (don't ask me what that is in English,
though).

So it's not banking per se, but it's finance-related.

~~~
opless
VAT Return. (According to Google Translate)

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bonaldi
And 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.

~~~
jasonjei
Does 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
At 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.

~~~
spatulon
Given that your first link redirects to

[https://itunesconnect.apple.com/itc/static/login?view=1&path...](https://itunesconnect.apple.com/itc/static/login?view=1&path=%2FWebObjects%2FiTunesConnect.woa%3F)

...it looks like they're still using WebObjects.

~~~
orangecat
Look the DOM in the browser inspector, it's definitely Angular. (And
angular.version reports 1.2, they need to upgrade). The WebObjects path is
probably for backward compatibility.

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boucher
I'm pretty shocked CNN would write an article about WebObjects. The news
itself is barely news at all though.

~~~
mwfunk
I 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.

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mlu
For 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.

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rm_-rf_slash
On 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
_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?_

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.

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ErikAugust
Weird how the article opens to a huge video interviewing a guy who did acid
with Jobs. Kind of lame, really.

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jrochkind1
I 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.

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based2
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tapestry)

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vbezhenar
Is there any modern web framework for Objective C? Ideally integrated with
other Apple technologies like CoreData.

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cloudjacker
And on the 6th day, Apple created the Internet in their own image and
likeness.

