Talk of opening WebObjects overheard at WWDC
Employees working the show floor of the Apple's developers conference last week could be overheard discussing the prospect of open-sourcing the company's WebObjects environment used for rapidly building and deploying web-based applications.
Once the bread and butter of NeXT Software, WebObjects typically fetched $50,000 for an unlimited license and generated nearly 50 percent of the company's revenues in the mid 1990's. If Apple had not bought-out NeXT in the latter days of 1996, the software would have surely accounted for more than half of NeXT's annual sales the following year.
Upon its arrival at Apple, WebObjects was slowly nurtured and transformed into a 100 percent pure Java-based application server. With the release of WebObjects 5.0 in 2001, Apple dropped the cost of the software to a staggering $699.
That same year a company post to Apple's WebObjects mailing list read: "Now that WebObjects 5 is out, Apple is gearing up to promote WebObjects more aggressively." It never seemed to happen. If there were strides being made to get the word out on WebObjects, they were clearly overshadowed by other efforts at the company -- mainly those focused on securing the fate of a lingering Macintosh platform.
Instead, Apple's focus on WebObjects remained largely internal. The software that once powered Dell?s online store was being used by Apple to run its own online business, which launched shortly after the NeXT acquisition. In latter years, WebObjects became the foundation of the now prominent and extremely successful iTunes Music service. But few external updates to WebObjects were being made available to the public and rumors implied that Apple had been furthering the development of the platform only for internal purposes.
Now four years later, with the Macintosh regaining popularity, Apple once again appears to be turning an external focus to the WebObjects platform. At last week's World Wide Developers Conference, the company announced a major upgrade to the software in WebObjects 5.3. Apple also announced that they were dropping the $699 licensing fee and instead would be distributing WebObjects free-of-charge along with Xcode 2.1, the newest release of its Macintosh development tools.
According to two independent sources on hand for the conference, Apple engineers discussing the future of WebObjects talked about open-sourcing the software. By opening WebObjects, Apple would make the documentation and source code of the software accessible to the general public, enabling anybody to aid in the forward development of the platform.
Insiders argue that opening the software could help strengthen Apple's presence in the enterprise IT market. WebObjects, which has been described by reviewers as the "Rolls Royce of web application development," could easily compete with competitive solutions like J2EE and .Net, they say.
One of the tipsters AppleInsider spoke to said he believed it was "only a matter of time" before Apple announced that it would be opening the software. Apple, which already retains an open source project centered around the foundation to the Mac OS X (Darwin), recently made another significant open source announcement.
Earlier this month, Apple's Dave Hyatt announced that the company was opening its KHTML-based WebKit framework found at the core of Safari, Dashboard, Mail.app, and many other Mac OS X applications. If the WebKit Open Source project turns into a success, WebObjects could follow in its footsteps.
In a recent update to his Surfin' Safari web site, Hyatt said of the WebKit project: "The response so far has been incredible. We've gotten lots of people building and testing, and we've already had lots of bug reports and patches. We'd love to see even more people get involved!"
Once the bread and butter of NeXT Software, WebObjects typically fetched $50,000 for an unlimited license and generated nearly 50 percent of the company's revenues in the mid 1990's. If Apple had not bought-out NeXT in the latter days of 1996, the software would have surely accounted for more than half of NeXT's annual sales the following year.
Upon its arrival at Apple, WebObjects was slowly nurtured and transformed into a 100 percent pure Java-based application server. With the release of WebObjects 5.0 in 2001, Apple dropped the cost of the software to a staggering $699.
That same year a company post to Apple's WebObjects mailing list read: "Now that WebObjects 5 is out, Apple is gearing up to promote WebObjects more aggressively." It never seemed to happen. If there were strides being made to get the word out on WebObjects, they were clearly overshadowed by other efforts at the company -- mainly those focused on securing the fate of a lingering Macintosh platform.
Instead, Apple's focus on WebObjects remained largely internal. The software that once powered Dell?s online store was being used by Apple to run its own online business, which launched shortly after the NeXT acquisition. In latter years, WebObjects became the foundation of the now prominent and extremely successful iTunes Music service. But few external updates to WebObjects were being made available to the public and rumors implied that Apple had been furthering the development of the platform only for internal purposes.
Now four years later, with the Macintosh regaining popularity, Apple once again appears to be turning an external focus to the WebObjects platform. At last week's World Wide Developers Conference, the company announced a major upgrade to the software in WebObjects 5.3. Apple also announced that they were dropping the $699 licensing fee and instead would be distributing WebObjects free-of-charge along with Xcode 2.1, the newest release of its Macintosh development tools.
According to two independent sources on hand for the conference, Apple engineers discussing the future of WebObjects talked about open-sourcing the software. By opening WebObjects, Apple would make the documentation and source code of the software accessible to the general public, enabling anybody to aid in the forward development of the platform.
Insiders argue that opening the software could help strengthen Apple's presence in the enterprise IT market. WebObjects, which has been described by reviewers as the "Rolls Royce of web application development," could easily compete with competitive solutions like J2EE and .Net, they say.
One of the tipsters AppleInsider spoke to said he believed it was "only a matter of time" before Apple announced that it would be opening the software. Apple, which already retains an open source project centered around the foundation to the Mac OS X (Darwin), recently made another significant open source announcement.
Earlier this month, Apple's Dave Hyatt announced that the company was opening its KHTML-based WebKit framework found at the core of Safari, Dashboard, Mail.app, and many other Mac OS X applications. If the WebKit Open Source project turns into a success, WebObjects could follow in its footsteps.
In a recent update to his Surfin' Safari web site, Hyatt said of the WebKit project: "The response so far has been incredible. We've gotten lots of people building and testing, and we've already had lots of bug reports and patches. We'd love to see even more people get involved!"
Comments
Originally posted by JBL
Is WebObjects based on Cocoa? I am trying to figure out how opening it would help Apple in the enterprise space. What prevents people from porting it to Windows or Linux, which would neutralize any advantage it gives Apple?
My hypothesis:
The deployment tools would be Open Sourced (they're based on Java), but the development tools wouldn't be. You'd still need OS X for that.
WebObjects applications can already be deployed to any J2EE server, so why not give away their own server to anyone who wants it?
It's the old Gilette maxim: Give away the razor, but sell the blades.
It's still a very nice system, but it's no longer head and shoulders above its competition, and my bet is Apple is just running out of ways to figure out how to get people to pay money for it.
Originally posted by JBL
Is WebObjects based on Cocoa? I am trying to figure out how opening it would help Apple in the enterprise space. What prevents people from porting it to Windows or Linux, which would neutralize any advantage it gives Apple?
WebObjects was originally a web-based sibling of Cocoa's AppKit, i.e. WebObjects used Cocoa's (or rather OpenStep's) foundation classes up to version 4.5, so WO is closely related to Cocoa, although not based on it. And it's equally cool
With WO version 5, a dramatic change was made. WO was moved entirely to Java and Obj-C support was dropped. The intriguing thing is that when this change was made, the WO team took another step away from Cocoa and created their own implementations of the foundation classes. Sure, we still use an NSArray to store our objects but it is a com.webobjects.foundation.NSArray, not a com.apple.cocoa.foundation.NSArray (also, note the absence of "apple" in the package name).
This, IMHO, is a huge hint that Apple has some undisclosed plans for WebObjects, perhaps opensourcing, perhaps selling it off, who knows. At least it makes no sense to maintain two separate codebases for the java foundation kit if the plan is to just bundle WO with Mac OS X and not allow it to run on any other platforms.
One thing is for sure: WO rules when it comes to web application development and my heart aches to see this extremely advanced technology slowly die away because of Apple's negligence. Here's to a brigther future for WO! (lifts glass)
Originally posted by Booga
When Web Objects came out, it was far and away more powerful than anything and everything else out there. That was 10 years ago, and since then the world has caught up. Now, it's on par with a lot of other solutions and locks you into Apple's development environment, as opposed to J2EE which is supported by an entire sub-industry.
It's still a very nice system, but it's no longer head and shoulders above its competition, and my bet is Apple is just running out of ways to figure out how to get people to pay money for it.
is anyone besides Apple using WebObjects anymore? is it a dead end? i'm just totally ignorant, to me it's either Linux, J2EE on Tomcat, ASP, or PHP Mysql....
gawd my mind is totally f*ked i am soooo out of the loop on the middleware thing. now where's my 1999 copy of Filemaker and Lasso. better yet, cold fusion when it was still owned by something called Allaire
old skool baby.
COBOL for Web. YEAHHHh
...it's the xanax, trying to think or do anything on my computer past 12midnight makes me a bit loopy
wooooooooo
.....................
Originally posted by sunilraman
is anyone besides Apple using WebObjects anymore? is it a dead end? i'm just totally ignorant, to me it's either Linux, J2EE on Tomcat, ASP, or PHP Mysql....
well, apple uses webobjects, so i guess that's one.
Originally posted by Booga
When Web Objects came out, it was far and away more powerful than anything and everything else out there. That was 10 years ago, and since then the world has caught up. Now, it's on par with a lot of other solutions and locks you into Apple's development environment, as opposed to J2EE which is supported by an entire sub-industry.
It's still a very nice system, but it's no longer head and shoulders above its competition, and my bet is Apple is just running out of ways to figure out how to get people to pay money for it.
I am sorry, but that's just nonsense. Have you checked out the J2EE world recently? It's a bloody mess, and almost every API out there is counter-intuitive.
WebObjects does not lock you into Apple's develoment environment. Far from it, you can use any java IDE you like, and I myself use Eclipse, a popular open source IDE.
Originally posted by Hugi
I am sorry, but that's just nonsense. Have you checked out the J2EE world recently? It's a bloody mess, and almost every API out there is counter-intuitive.
WebObjects does not lock you into Apple's develoment environment. Far from it, you can use any java IDE you like, and I myself use Eclipse, a popular open source IDE.
I must admit to not having evaluated WebObjects in several years. Glad its proprietary nature has changed. However, you can hardly claim that WebObjects is "intuitive"... it's just as counter-intuitive as any of the others unless you have extensive OpenStep/Cocoa experience.
When it came out, though, J2EE didn't even exist, nor did most of the other middleware solutions, including .Net. You can't claim that their presence in the marketplace had no effect on WebObjects' saleability. It's simply not worth as much money as it once was now that competitors can do the same thing. I doubt Dell is losing any sleep over moving away from WebObjects, but when they started out, there wasn't anything else that would have served their needs.
Originally posted by sunilraman
is anyone besides Apple using WebObjects anymore?
.....................
Yes, read more here on WebObjects here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects
and more on companies using WebObjects here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObje...ing_WebObjects
That is only a small sample.
A lot of big companies use WebObjects internally, so you won't see a URL pop up on Google
Also, a lot of sites rewrite the URL path, so you won't see the familiar /cgi-bin/WebObjects, but the site is still using WebObjects. BBC, Toyota and Deutsche Bank come to my mind...
Originally posted by Booga
[However, you can hardly claim that WebObjects is "intuitive"... it's just as counter-intuitive as any of the others unless you have extensive OpenStep/Cocoa experience.
Hmm, must have been a long time since you last looked at WebObjects. While some frameworks have OpenStep heritage, WebObjects (since 5.0) is *pure* Java.
No need to learn about Cocoa. And Apple's own documentation also improved quite a bit since then. Have a look there and on other code collection pages...
http://developer.apple.com/reference...cts/index.html
http://wocode.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/WOCode
Now that WebObjects is part of xCode 2.1, there is no reason not to play with it for free.
Have fun 8)
Originally posted by Booga
I must admit to not having evaluated WebObjects in several years. Glad its proprietary nature has changed. However, you can hardly claim that WebObjects is "intuitive"... it's just as counter-intuitive as any of the others unless you have extensive OpenStep/Cocoa experience.
Far from it, WebObjects is much more intuitive than any of the currently available J2EE environments. Creating, deploying and mainting a J2EE project is a nightmare, in my opinion. Come on, you must have seen that many people in the J2EE crowd are celebrating "Ruby on Rails" as a saviour for web developers - what does that say about J2EE's current status?
What is it about WO that you find counter-intuitive?
When it came out, though, J2EE didn't even exist, nor did most of the other middleware solutions, including .Net. You can't claim that their presence in the marketplace had no effect on WebObjects' saleability. It's simply not worth as much money as it once was now that competitors can do the same thing. I doubt Dell is losing any sleep over moving away from WebObjects, but when they started out, there wasn't anything else that would have served their needs.
That is true, new solutions have had a huge effect on WO. WO now has competition, in the same way that the IBM PC was competition to the Mac when it first came out. Crappy technology that everyone adopts because it's "industry standard".
But WebObjects, because of its superior technology (compared to anything else available in the web market today) is more than worth the $699 price tag Apple puts on it. The problem is that Apple does nothing (not an understatement - Apple does NOTHING AT ALL) to market this fact. This creates the illusion that WO is dead, when the opposite is true. It's an amazing technology, far ahead of anything available today, and why Apple does nothing to promote it is just, well, beyond me. Honestly.
Originally posted by sunilraman
is anyone besides Apple using WebObjects anymore? is it a dead end? i'm just totally ignorant, to me it's either Linux, J2EE on Tomcat, ASP, or PHP Mysql....
gawd my mind is totally f*ked i am soooo out of the loop on the middleware thing. now where's my 1999 copy of Filemaker and Lasso. better yet, cold fusion when it was still owned by something called Allaire
Hey, a fellow Lasso user!
J2EE, ASP and PHP look really dated when compared to WO. They're probably more suitable for very simple stuff, but for projects above a certain size, WO is the way to go.
So, yeah, try WO - it rules.
COBOL for Web. YEAHHHh
I'm wondering if Apple releases WebObjects as open and free if some dedicated volunteers will restore to WebObjects 5 the Objective-C glory that the previous high-dollar versions possessed.
Originally posted by macFanDave
From what I've seen, the glory days of WebObjects was when it was an Objective-C system. When it went from ObjC to Java, the price went from $50,000 to $699.
I'm wondering if Apple releases WebObjects as open and free if some dedicated volunteers will restore to WebObjects 5 the Objective-C glory that the previous high-dollar versions possessed.
Yes! I would love it if WO went back to Objective-C. With more folks knowing Cocoa, and free WO development, it seems like there would be a lot of potential Obj-C WO people. I loved the way WO was analogous to many parts of Cocoa. Can you imagine an updated EOF and something similar to Cocoa bindings in WO? That would be sweet!
Originally posted by macFanDave
From what I've seen, the glory days of WebObjects was when it was an Objective-C system. When it went from ObjC to Java, the price went from $50,000 to $699.
Wrong.
* WO supported java alongside ObjC back in the NeXT days, and did so up to WO 5.
* Apple lowered the price of WO to $699 in the year 2000.
* WO 5 was shipped in 2001 and was the first release to drop support for ObjC.
Now, ObjC is nice. ObjC is a far better language than java and I used to do all of my programming in ObjC before WO 5. But Java has a lot of momentum behind it, you can hire java programmers of the street (almost literally, these days) and the amount of java class libraries available is stunning. If you're doing web work, java is the way to go, unfortunately, so I think Apple made the right decision to make java their primary focus. For example, I doubt WO sould be offering the really cool web services features WO 5 has if they had stuck with ObjC.
Not to mention, I am deploying my apps across several platforms, problem free. Java is nice that way.
I'm wondering if Apple releases WebObjects as open and free if some dedicated volunteers will restore to WebObjects 5 the Objective-C glory that the previous high-dollar versions possessed.
I doubt it. In fact, I believe an open source movement would be more likely to favor java, the simple reason being the sheer size of the java population.
If Apple were to make WO a proprietary vertical solution again, ObjC might be the way to go, but Java is just right, right now.
Yup... that was the last WWDC I attended, actually.
"Hmm, must have been a long time since you last looked at WebObjects. While some frameworks have OpenStep heritage, WebObjects (since 5.0) is *pure* Java."
Most Java applications don't use anything named "NSArray". That may be "pure" in the "everything is written in Java" sense, but not in the "we use native Java patterns and libraries." And trust me, it is *not* intuitive to a newcomer, or wasn't as of 5.0, which is the last time I looked at it.
J2EE suffers from some implementation issues surrounding beans, but then, why use beans? And if you leave out beans, there are a lot of tools that combine JSP and a back-end that provide a powerful, intuitive framework to a highly interactive site. I think these started with Struts a few years ago, which actually uses a Smalltalk/ObjC-like "MVC" pattern, and advanced from there.
And like it or hate it (I hate it), .Net is a pretty intuitive and powerful system. If there's one thing Microsoft knows how to do, it's to pander to developers.
As for "Ruby on Rails", I've never used it, but my impression is that its greatest strength was integrating Ajax (the method Google uses to get a scrolling map.) I'm now out of the website building business, but that seems like a pretty compelling feature to me, and I'd definitely be looking at it.
But WebObjects, because of its superior technology (compared to anything else available in the web market today) is more than worth the $699 price tag Apple puts on it. The problem is that Apple does nothing (not an understatement - Apple does NOTHING AT ALL) to market this fact. This creates the illusion that WO is dead, when the opposite is true. It's an amazing technology, far ahead of anything available today, and why Apple does nothing to promote it is just, well, beyond me. Honestly.
That's what they always do.
Like with uuum...OS X.