Maybe you would have gotten a technology preview - like the one Apple gave at the "3rd party advocacy group's" annual summit.
Hello Jim,
I am a big fan of WO and I am a subscriber of two Apple mailing list on WO just to get informed on the "what's coming". I wish I could afford to go to WWDC. WOWODC although probably even better, is not Apple.
Even if I knew very little of HTML or web programming, with WebObjects Builder and EOmodeler, I was able, to create a very decent website with relational database to accept ton of registration after a newspaper ad.
I deployed a few instance of my application on OS X server to handle the one week rush.
I was impress how easy it was to do something so professional with so little knowledge.
Since then, I really feel sad to see what Apple as done with it. Gone is the Apple GUI Tool. I now have look in the open source community to find tool.
Eclipse might be the greatest tool on earth but this is not Apple Technology. Apple had let it go.
From WO, I can't access Mac OS X technology that would help me a lot like text service to check spelling.
It is right there in the system for many different language, but I have to look into open source to help me.
(Maybe it has changed since then).
If Apple really loved WO so much they would have kept up-to-date the tools that helped made WO so great.
Apple created XCode to help developer use Apple Technology. They won't let open source community to take care of
developing the tool to use the Mac OS X Foundation Framework. Why do they do it for WebObjects framework....
Apple is loosing interest but not enough to give the whole framework to open source. They just don't want to do the tool to used their technology.
What surprise me the most, it the fact that with M-V-C, I could, in theory, develop one Model, one controller, and then create one view for the mac, one for the Web and one for the iPhone.
I wish Apple would unified those 3 technology and really create a single MVC programming environment.
Right. You might have inside information that companies like Google, IBM and Oracle and the many, many others that have businesses that depend on Java and actively support Java development are all about to go out of business overnight, but otherwise I rather doubt it. There are literally millions of Java developers out there, and plenty of people who no more want to be tied in to a closed and proprietary Objective C/Cocoa environment than they do into a Win32/.NET one.
ObjC/Cocoa APIs are not closed. They conform to the Openstep API Specification and have progressed from there. You want to help then contribute to the GNUstep project to make their implementation current.
If Apple really loved WO so much they would have kept up-to-date the tools that helped made WO so great.
Apple created XCode to help developer use Apple Technology. They won't let open source community to take care of
developing the tool to use the Mac OS X Foundation Framework. Why do they do it for WebObjects framework....
Actually, the main reasons they deprecated the tools back when Tiger was released is because the WOLips tools are better, and the vast majority of WO developers were using them, including Apple. I agree WOBuilder was cool when it worked but it was pretty buggy, and while not as purely visual, WOLips is much more powerful.
Since they deprecated the tools, and started directly supporting the development of WOLips, it has improved in leaps and bounds. Now Apple can focus Xcode on Cocoa development (which it is great for), and not try and staple a Java development toolset on top of it. Never was very good for Java or WO, though it was usable. WOLips is better, and is improved literally practically daily.
You can literally request a feature, or a bug fix, and it may actually be committed to the repository for download the same day or a few hours later. If they decide against adding the feature, you'll be able to make your case and discuss it on the boards. Does Apple do that for anything? I like the polish of Xcode, but Eclipse/WOLips offers a fantastic amount of immediate assistance and rapid fixes that big companies can't really compete with.
So Apple lets the open source people make improvements to the tools, and when they want something done, they hire the guys to do it for them, then it's released into the wild. Actually works very well. Apple doesn't need to burden their dev tools unit with developing WO tools. They can just work on the underlying frameworks.
I am very informed of Java usage these days, I was developing with java for some years, but all I can tell is "Java SUCKS", and it does not matter what companies use it IBM, whatever, they use it because they built all their business infrastructure on it in old days and now it would cost them billions to move to another language/tech.
In what sense does Java "suck"? You can't justify your statement that Java is used only because of stupid PHBs? Java has been battle-testing in production environments in various industries and scales very well under heavy volumes. Global corporations like IBM, Google, Amazon, eBay, SAP, all major Wall Street banks, and other large corporations have invested heavily in it. These are companies who require insanely high uptimes, low latency, and just all-around reliability. If Java "sucked" as badly as you claim it does, then all of those companies would have gone out of business.
Or do you mean that the syntax "sucks"? Well, that's subjective, but I've seen projects built with Java with extremely high turnover rates. The projects didn't fail, because the language is maintainable and has excellent tooling (Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ). The tooling perhaps falls short of Visual Studio, but it's comparable.
Perhaps you're just annoyed that it takes you too long to write "Hello, world" and simple web CRUD apps. Then again, Java is not meant to be used for little pet projects. Java is the enterprise development platform of choice.
So, aside from .NET, what alternatives do you propose to Java on enterprise servers? RoR? PHP? Neither of the languages have basic Java features like namespaces, and their performance is a joke.
Quote:
Microsoft also is a big company, but as you see it suck, it sucked with Vista, it will such with windows 7.
Again, justify your statement. Windows is the desktop environment of choice for all major corporations. Exchange is the leading email/calendar/collaboration server. Microsoft had to convince corporations to switch away from Novell, so there was obviously a compelling reason for them to do so.
Quote:
I don't know who is using windows nowadays for serious work and productivity.
Most, if not all Fortune 500 companies use Windows on developer workstations. There's the odd exception of platform-specific C/C++ code running on Unix servers (which needs to be written on Unix workstations), but that's about it.
Quote:
I don't belive that Apple could not create a new (may be scripting) language to dominate the Web Development.
Do you have any idea how much effort and brainpower it takes to develop a new programming language? It's a major feat of computer science. I'm not saying that Apple can't do it, but there's no business reason to divest themselves of Objective-C.
Quote:
Take a look back at 2005 when they had just some users with OSX, but now with Leopard, they changed users' mind, the same happened with iPhone, Nokia and Palm was the best known, dominants, but they suck so ..... it does not make difference with java too and how many people (millions or just one) are using technologies we have, everything is changing.
iPhone development taking off had nothing to do with Objective-C or Cocoa. It has everything to do with the iPhone being the most popular mobile platform and enterprises investing the money and developer resources required to get applications onto that platform.
iPhone development taking off had nothing to do with Objective-C or Cocoa. It has everything to do with the iPhone being the most popular mobile platform and enterprises investing the money and developer resources required to get applications onto that platform.
Well, I might quibble with you a bit there. Cocoa being fabulous certainly had something to do with it. Other devices have apps, but the Cocoa-based sdk and Obj C had something to do with it. Fast development, cool tools and a cool way to deploy . . . . built with WebObjects.
Well, I might quibble with you a bit there. Cocoa being fabulous certainly had something to do with it. Other devices have apps, but the Cocoa-based sdk and Obj C had something to do with it. Fast development, cool tools and a cool way to deploy . . . . built with WebObjects.
Well, in my experience playing briefly with XCode/Objective-C/Cocoa:
1) The XCode (non-UI coding environment) is terrible. It's orders of magnitude worse than Eclipse/Netbeans for things like auto-completing, API searches, debugging, and unit testing, it's just woefully lacking.
2) Objective-C, while having low-level coding features, has what is in my admittedly subjective opinion as a Java developer horrible syntax. What's worse, the deficiencies in the IDE don't make up for it the way Eclipse/Netbeans make up for Java's syntax quirks. The need to write a header file for every class makes no sense from a Java perspective.
3) The GUI Builder is excellent. It's better than anything else I've seen by orders of magnitude. The tooling to bind UI elements to object properties is so intuitive that it makes UI design and testing almost trivial to get an app up and running if I've gotten around the quirks of Objective-C and the code editor.
4) Instruments is also excellent as a most intuitive wrapper around DTrace.
I'm not sure why Apple would develop such an awesome GUI builder and Instruments, and neglect the meat of the IDE, which is anything to do with actually writing code.
I'm wondering if Apple is secretly planning on writing Eclipse plugins (including on OS-X only plugin for the GUI builder) and deprecating the XCode code editor. This wouldn't be a bad strategy, since they could leverage a more stable IDE code base, maintain native elements through SWT, and yet still tie the larger Cocoa development environment to OS X.
This would resolve all of 1) and large chunks of 2).
Anyway, I have no insider info on this. This is just pure speculation on my part.
Well, in my experience playing briefly with XCode/Objective-C/Cocoa:
1) The XCode (non-UI coding environment) is terrible. It's orders of magnitude worse than Eclipse/Netbeans for things like auto-completing, API searches, debugging, and unit testing, it's just woefully lacking.
2) Objective-C, while having low-level coding features, has what is in my admittedly subjective opinion as a Java developer horrible syntax. What's worse, the deficiencies in the IDE don't make up for it the way Eclipse/Netbeans make up for Java's syntax quirks. The need to write a header file for every class makes no sense from a Java perspective.
I'm not sure why Apple would develop such an awesome GUI builder and Instruments, and neglect the meat of the IDE, which is anything to do with actually writing code.
I'm wondering if Apple is secretly planning on writing Eclipse plugins (including on OS-X only plugin for the GUI builder) and deprecating the XCode code editor. This wouldn't be a bad strategy, since they could leverage a more stable IDE code base, maintain native elements through SWT, and yet still tie the larger Cocoa development environment to OS X.
This would resolve all of 1) and large chunks of 2).
Anyway, I have no insider info on this. This is just pure speculation on my part.
Eeesh. Well, I have to say, Java is OK, from my perspective, but Objective C blows the doors off of it in terms of intuitive coding. It's not Java, so it doesn't act like Java. Instead, it lets you actually use dynamism and informs the user of methods what various passed in values actually are, as opposed to relying on auto-complete or requiring the developer to go back to the docs. So we will certainly have to agree to disagree there. I like the fact that it is a simple, straight-forward language, with easy syntax . . . . [receiver methodReceiverRespondsToWithParameter: x]; as opposed to object.method(x); (what the heck is x again?)
I was a Cocoa developer using Xcode, and am now a WO developer using WOLips and Eclipse.
Apple IS in fact making massive cool changes to Xcode, and now that they don't need to try and be nice with Java, they can make it even cooler. I'd suggest you look at it again. While I like some aspects of Eclipse, I like the polish of Xcode and its integration with IB much better. And Eclipse is very finicky and crash prone . . . well, not necessarily crash, but stuff just stops working until you save, clean, quit, then re-launch. XCode does a much better job than it used to in all the areas you mentioned, and there is a lot better integration with docs than Eclipse IMHO. Not to mention many other features Eclipse just doesn't have.
There is NO WAY Apple is going to ditch Xcode to go with Eclipse. Cocoa people would run screaming for the hills if they did.
I think the article is a little misguided. I believe WebObjects 5.6 (currently under development) will improve in many different areas including deployment. And as a requirement the WebObjects frameworks and related files are being decoupled from the operating system itself to make this a better experience. I think that is all. If you are a WebObjects developer there is no need to panic.
The story is more accurately being told in ars technica :
ObjC/Cocoa APIs are not closed. They conform to the Openstep API Specification and have progressed from there. You want to help then contribute to the GNUstep project to make their implementation current.
You don't honestly believe that for one second do you? Find me one modern Objective C/Cocoa based application for Mac OS X or the iPhone (of which there are many, and quite excellent ones too) and name me a platform other than Mac OS X or OS X for iPhone that it will run on. Good it may be, but it's most certainly a very closed and proprietary platform.
Why on earth should I want to contribute to GNUstep when I can already do all I want and more with Java?
You don't honestly believe that for one second do you? Find me one modern Objective C/Cocoa based application for Mac OS X or the iPhone (of which there are many, and quite excellent ones too) and name me a platform other than Mac OS X or OS X for iPhone that it will run on. Good it may be, but it's most certainly a very closed and proprietary platform.
Why on earth should I want to contribute to GNUstep when I can already do all I want and more with Java?
The whole point of the XCode/Objective-C/Cocoa ecosystem is to get developers to write native apps for OS X platforms such as the Mac and iPhone to give those platforms an advantage over other platforms such as Windows. The purpose of NeXTStep may have been as a cross-platform GUI toolkit, but that's ancient history.
Microsoft also is a big company, but as you see it suck, it sucked with Vista, it will such with windows 7.
I don't know who is using windows nowadays for serious work and productivity. I don't belive that Apple could not create a new (may be scripting) language to dominate the Web Development. Take a look back at 2005 when they had just some users with OSX, but now with Leopard, they changed users' mind, the same happened with iPhone, Nokia and Palm was the best known, dominants, but they suck so ..... it does not make difference with java too and how many people (millions or just one) are using technologies we have, everything is changing.
I would disagree Apples good a making programs with nice interfaces that do also work well. When it comes to actual programing languages and development environments they must be among the worst. From the developers I know that have gone from being .NET developers to spending the last year writing apps for the iPhone (successful apps to) the consistent opinion is Microsoft 10 years ago was spoiling developers in comparison to what Apple have now.
When it comes to web development, I think its also going to be hard for anyone to catch Microsoft with their .NET framework. Java is probably about the only thing that could do it. Microsoft has been brining out new controls and tools in its framework since it came out that if you stopped 5 years ago, you would be completely out of date. So unless Apple have been doing the same it would be hard to imagine that WebObjects was still any good.
Or another easy way to tell is does anyone developing in it still have to write SQL to communicate with a db, or does it have built into it a way developers can only ever need to interrogate their object model and a framework does the translation from object model to relational model.
Comments
Jim
Maybe you would have gotten a technology preview - like the one Apple gave at the "3rd party advocacy group's" annual summit.
Hello Jim,
I am a big fan of WO and I am a subscriber of two Apple mailing list on WO just to get informed on the "what's coming". I wish I could afford to go to WWDC. WOWODC although probably even better, is not Apple.
Even if I knew very little of HTML or web programming, with WebObjects Builder and EOmodeler, I was able, to create a very decent website with relational database to accept ton of registration after a newspaper ad.
I deployed a few instance of my application on OS X server to handle the one week rush.
I was impress how easy it was to do something so professional with so little knowledge.
Since then, I really feel sad to see what Apple as done with it. Gone is the Apple GUI Tool. I now have look in the open source community to find tool.
Eclipse might be the greatest tool on earth but this is not Apple Technology. Apple had let it go.
From WO, I can't access Mac OS X technology that would help me a lot like text service to check spelling.
It is right there in the system for many different language, but I have to look into open source to help me.
(Maybe it has changed since then).
If Apple really loved WO so much they would have kept up-to-date the tools that helped made WO so great.
Apple created XCode to help developer use Apple Technology. They won't let open source community to take care of
developing the tool to use the Mac OS X Foundation Framework. Why do they do it for WebObjects framework....
Apple is loosing interest but not enough to give the whole framework to open source. They just don't want to do the tool to used their technology.
What surprise me the most, it the fact that with M-V-C, I could, in theory, develop one Model, one controller, and then create one view for the mac, one for the Web and one for the iPhone.
I wish Apple would unified those 3 technology and really create a single MVC programming environment.
Right. You might have inside information that companies like Google, IBM and Oracle and the many, many others that have businesses that depend on Java and actively support Java development are all about to go out of business overnight, but otherwise I rather doubt it. There are literally millions of Java developers out there, and plenty of people who no more want to be tied in to a closed and proprietary Objective C/Cocoa environment than they do into a Win32/.NET one.
ObjC/Cocoa APIs are not closed. They conform to the Openstep API Specification and have progressed from there. You want to help then contribute to the GNUstep project to make their implementation current.
If Apple really loved WO so much they would have kept up-to-date the tools that helped made WO so great.
Apple created XCode to help developer use Apple Technology. They won't let open source community to take care of
developing the tool to use the Mac OS X Foundation Framework. Why do they do it for WebObjects framework....
Actually, the main reasons they deprecated the tools back when Tiger was released is because the WOLips tools are better, and the vast majority of WO developers were using them, including Apple. I agree WOBuilder was cool when it worked but it was pretty buggy, and while not as purely visual, WOLips is much more powerful.
Since they deprecated the tools, and started directly supporting the development of WOLips, it has improved in leaps and bounds. Now Apple can focus Xcode on Cocoa development (which it is great for), and not try and staple a Java development toolset on top of it. Never was very good for Java or WO, though it was usable. WOLips is better, and is improved literally practically daily.
You can literally request a feature, or a bug fix, and it may actually be committed to the repository for download the same day or a few hours later. If they decide against adding the feature, you'll be able to make your case and discuss it on the boards. Does Apple do that for anything? I like the polish of Xcode, but Eclipse/WOLips offers a fantastic amount of immediate assistance and rapid fixes that big companies can't really compete with.
So Apple lets the open source people make improvements to the tools, and when they want something done, they hire the guys to do it for them, then it's released into the wild. Actually works very well. Apple doesn't need to burden their dev tools unit with developing WO tools. They can just work on the underlying frameworks.
I am very informed of Java usage these days, I was developing with java for some years, but all I can tell is "Java SUCKS", and it does not matter what companies use it IBM, whatever, they use it because they built all their business infrastructure on it in old days and now it would cost them billions to move to another language/tech.
In what sense does Java "suck"? You can't justify your statement that Java is used only because of stupid PHBs? Java has been battle-testing in production environments in various industries and scales very well under heavy volumes. Global corporations like IBM, Google, Amazon, eBay, SAP, all major Wall Street banks, and other large corporations have invested heavily in it. These are companies who require insanely high uptimes, low latency, and just all-around reliability. If Java "sucked" as badly as you claim it does, then all of those companies would have gone out of business.
Or do you mean that the syntax "sucks"? Well, that's subjective, but I've seen projects built with Java with extremely high turnover rates. The projects didn't fail, because the language is maintainable and has excellent tooling (Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ). The tooling perhaps falls short of Visual Studio, but it's comparable.
Perhaps you're just annoyed that it takes you too long to write "Hello, world" and simple web CRUD apps. Then again, Java is not meant to be used for little pet projects. Java is the enterprise development platform of choice.
So, aside from .NET, what alternatives do you propose to Java on enterprise servers? RoR? PHP? Neither of the languages have basic Java features like namespaces, and their performance is a joke.
Microsoft also is a big company, but as you see it suck, it sucked with Vista, it will such with windows 7.
Again, justify your statement. Windows is the desktop environment of choice for all major corporations. Exchange is the leading email/calendar/collaboration server. Microsoft had to convince corporations to switch away from Novell, so there was obviously a compelling reason for them to do so.
I don't know who is using windows nowadays for serious work and productivity.
Most, if not all Fortune 500 companies use Windows on developer workstations. There's the odd exception of platform-specific C/C++ code running on Unix servers (which needs to be written on Unix workstations), but that's about it.
I don't belive that Apple could not create a new (may be scripting) language to dominate the Web Development.
Do you have any idea how much effort and brainpower it takes to develop a new programming language? It's a major feat of computer science. I'm not saying that Apple can't do it, but there's no business reason to divest themselves of Objective-C.
Take a look back at 2005 when they had just some users with OSX, but now with Leopard, they changed users' mind, the same happened with iPhone, Nokia and Palm was the best known, dominants, but they suck
iPhone development taking off had nothing to do with Objective-C or Cocoa. It has everything to do with the iPhone being the most popular mobile platform and enterprises investing the money and developer resources required to get applications onto that platform.
iPhone development taking off had nothing to do with Objective-C or Cocoa. It has everything to do with the iPhone being the most popular mobile platform and enterprises investing the money and developer resources required to get applications onto that platform.
Well, I might quibble with you a bit there. Cocoa being fabulous certainly had something to do with it. Other devices have apps, but the Cocoa-based sdk and Obj C had something to do with it. Fast development, cool tools and a cool way to deploy . . . . built with WebObjects.
Well, I might quibble with you a bit there. Cocoa being fabulous certainly had something to do with it. Other devices have apps, but the Cocoa-based sdk and Obj C had something to do with it. Fast development, cool tools and a cool way to deploy . . . . built with WebObjects.
Well, in my experience playing briefly with XCode/Objective-C/Cocoa:
1) The XCode (non-UI coding environment) is terrible. It's orders of magnitude worse than Eclipse/Netbeans for things like auto-completing, API searches, debugging, and unit testing, it's just woefully lacking.
2) Objective-C, while having low-level coding features, has what is in my admittedly subjective opinion as a Java developer horrible syntax. What's worse, the deficiencies in the IDE don't make up for it the way Eclipse/Netbeans make up for Java's syntax quirks. The need to write a header file for every class makes no sense from a Java perspective.
3) The GUI Builder is excellent. It's better than anything else I've seen by orders of magnitude. The tooling to bind UI elements to object properties is so intuitive that it makes UI design and testing almost trivial to get an app up and running if I've gotten around the quirks of Objective-C and the code editor.
4) Instruments is also excellent as a most intuitive wrapper around DTrace.
I'm not sure why Apple would develop such an awesome GUI builder and Instruments, and neglect the meat of the IDE, which is anything to do with actually writing code.
I'm wondering if Apple is secretly planning on writing Eclipse plugins (including on OS-X only plugin for the GUI builder) and deprecating the XCode code editor. This wouldn't be a bad strategy, since they could leverage a more stable IDE code base, maintain native elements through SWT, and yet still tie the larger Cocoa development environment to OS X.
This would resolve all of 1) and large chunks of 2).
Anyway, I have no insider info on this. This is just pure speculation on my part.
Well, in my experience playing briefly with XCode/Objective-C/Cocoa:
1) The XCode (non-UI coding environment) is terrible. It's orders of magnitude worse than Eclipse/Netbeans for things like auto-completing, API searches, debugging, and unit testing, it's just woefully lacking.
2) Objective-C, while having low-level coding features, has what is in my admittedly subjective opinion as a Java developer horrible syntax. What's worse, the deficiencies in the IDE don't make up for it the way Eclipse/Netbeans make up for Java's syntax quirks. The need to write a header file for every class makes no sense from a Java perspective.
I'm not sure why Apple would develop such an awesome GUI builder and Instruments, and neglect the meat of the IDE, which is anything to do with actually writing code.
I'm wondering if Apple is secretly planning on writing Eclipse plugins (including on OS-X only plugin for the GUI builder) and deprecating the XCode code editor. This wouldn't be a bad strategy, since they could leverage a more stable IDE code base, maintain native elements through SWT, and yet still tie the larger Cocoa development environment to OS X.
This would resolve all of 1) and large chunks of 2).
Anyway, I have no insider info on this. This is just pure speculation on my part.
Eeesh. Well, I have to say, Java is OK, from my perspective, but Objective C blows the doors off of it in terms of intuitive coding. It's not Java, so it doesn't act like Java. Instead, it lets you actually use dynamism and informs the user of methods what various passed in values actually are, as opposed to relying on auto-complete or requiring the developer to go back to the docs. So we will certainly have to agree to disagree there. I like the fact that it is a simple, straight-forward language, with easy syntax . . . . [receiver methodReceiverRespondsToWithParameter: x]; as opposed to object.method(x); (what the heck is x again?)
I was a Cocoa developer using Xcode, and am now a WO developer using WOLips and Eclipse.
Apple IS in fact making massive cool changes to Xcode, and now that they don't need to try and be nice with Java, they can make it even cooler. I'd suggest you look at it again. While I like some aspects of Eclipse, I like the polish of Xcode and its integration with IB much better. And Eclipse is very finicky and crash prone . . . well, not necessarily crash, but stuff just stops working until you save, clean, quit, then re-launch. XCode does a much better job than it used to in all the areas you mentioned, and there is a lot better integration with docs than Eclipse IMHO. Not to mention many other features Eclipse just doesn't have.
There is NO WAY Apple is going to ditch Xcode to go with Eclipse. Cocoa people would run screaming for the hills if they did.
I guess it's what we are used to.
The story is more accurately being told in ars technica :
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...-premature.ars
ObjC/Cocoa APIs are not closed. They conform to the Openstep API Specification and have progressed from there. You want to help then contribute to the GNUstep project to make their implementation current.
You don't honestly believe that for one second do you? Find me one modern Objective C/Cocoa based application for Mac OS X or the iPhone (of which there are many, and quite excellent ones too) and name me a platform other than Mac OS X or OS X for iPhone that it will run on. Good it may be, but it's most certainly a very closed and proprietary platform.
Why on earth should I want to contribute to GNUstep when I can already do all I want and more with Java?
You don't honestly believe that for one second do you? Find me one modern Objective C/Cocoa based application for Mac OS X or the iPhone (of which there are many, and quite excellent ones too) and name me a platform other than Mac OS X or OS X for iPhone that it will run on. Good it may be, but it's most certainly a very closed and proprietary platform.
Why on earth should I want to contribute to GNUstep when I can already do all I want and more with Java?
The whole point of the XCode/Objective-C/Cocoa ecosystem is to get developers to write native apps for OS X platforms such as the Mac and iPhone to give those platforms an advantage over other platforms such as Windows. The purpose of NeXTStep may have been as a cross-platform GUI toolkit, but that's ancient history.
Microsoft also is a big company, but as you see it suck, it sucked with Vista, it will such with windows 7.
I don't know who is using windows nowadays for serious work and productivity. I don't belive that Apple could not create a new (may be scripting) language to dominate the Web Development. Take a look back at 2005 when they had just some users with OSX, but now with Leopard, they changed users' mind, the same happened with iPhone, Nokia and Palm was the best known, dominants, but they suck
I would disagree Apples good a making programs with nice interfaces that do also work well. When it comes to actual programing languages and development environments they must be among the worst. From the developers I know that have gone from being .NET developers to spending the last year writing apps for the iPhone (successful apps to) the consistent opinion is Microsoft 10 years ago was spoiling developers in comparison to what Apple have now.
When it comes to web development, I think its also going to be hard for anyone to catch Microsoft with their .NET framework. Java is probably about the only thing that could do it. Microsoft has been brining out new controls and tools in its framework since it came out that if you stopped 5 years ago, you would be completely out of date. So unless Apple have been doing the same it would be hard to imagine that WebObjects was still any good.
Or another easy way to tell is does anyone developing in it still have to write SQL to communicate with a db, or does it have built into it a way developers can only ever need to interrogate their object model and a framework does the translation from object model to relational model.