InfoQ

InfoQ

News

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

WebObjects to be Open Sourced; Apple to focus on WO Runtime

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Aug 28, 2006

Sections
Operations & Infrastructure,
Enterprise Architecture,
Development,
Architecture & Design
Topics
Business ,
Web Frameworks ,
Application Servers ,
Java
Tags
Apple ,
WebObjects
Apple has announced it's new strategy for Web Objects on the webobjects-dev list last week, saying that the company will be be open sourcing the Web Objects framework and focus it's own engineering resources instead on the the Web Objects runtime environment [on the Mac]. It's areas of focus will be:
  • Improving performance, manageability, and standards compliance
  • Making WO work well with ANT and the most popular IDEs, including Xcode and Eclipse
  • Opening and making public all standards and formats that WO depends upon
ThinkSecret is also reporting the Apple will be open sourcing most of WebObjects 5.4 next year and says that the new version will include use Apache WebServer instead of it's own, implement Java NIO and JMX.

Web Objects was the worlds first object oriented appserver, released by NeXT Software in 1996 (for building rich client apps on the NeXT OS), and acquired by Apple and ported to Java as a web application server in mid 2001with the capability to deploy Web Objects apps as .WAR files to any appserver and support for Servlets, JSP, and EJB in 2002.   WebObjects went free for development and deployment as of version 5.3 with other platforms no longer supported.

WebObjects was known for being years ahead of it's time with it's Enterprise Object Framework - a mature o/r mapping solution as well as it's web application and control framework (WOF) which was supposedly the inspiration behind Tapestry - the first popular component-oriented Java web framework.  Both the EOF and WOF came with WYSIWYG builder tools which were also among the first in the industry. WebObjects supports RAD development as Swing or HTML apps.  Apple uses WebObjects behind Apple Store, .Mac online services and the iTunes Music Store.  An Eclipse plugin for WO development called WO Lips has also been in development independently for some time.
I hate it by Maurice Zeijen Posted
I love it by Boris Kraft Posted
Great product by Peter Fournier Posted
  1. Back to top

    I hate it

    by Maurice Zeijen

    We use it at work and I hate it most of the time ;). But that it goes open source is a very good thing. Then finally I will be rid of the annoying 'request limit reached' development mode thingy. But with a bit of luck we will be ported to another framework by then.

  2. Back to top

    I love it

    by Boris Kraft

    Its about time. I wonder if the release of Sope has triggered this?

    WO is a brilliant piece of software. Steep learning curve, but its the only software I have ever worked with that was capable of still amazing me with its outstanding conceptional thouroughness after several years of usage. I wish the project all the luck.

    betterfasterbigger

  3. Back to top

    Great product

    by Peter Fournier

    I have used WebObjects since 1998 on Windows and even today I would say it is head and shoulders above existing J2EE solutions. The EOF DB Modeling is very easy to work with and makes DB access simple and easy to use as Objects. The page building is great and you can graphically bind directly from your DB objects to objects on pages. It is a great environment. You really can put serious applications together quickly with real logic, not just a Hello World, you can quickly build real applications hitting DBs doing useful things.

    My only real complaint about WO is that Apple decided to pull it back and only support development and deployment on their platform. IMO this was a tragic mistake that has seriously reduced the potential user base for the product. Hopefully when opened up it will become fully available in dev and prod on other platforms again.

    My company has a very large WO production environment that handles millions of hits per day, approx. 250 million unique user sessions per day, and is very stable. We do not run Macs, are not going to run Macs and are currently in an initiative coverting from WO to J2EE I am sad to say.

Educational Content

New-age Transactional Systems - Not Your Grandpa's OLTP

John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.

Cool Code

Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.

Collaboration: At the Extremities of Extreme

Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.

Yesod Web Framework

Michael Snoyman presents Yesod, a web framework written in Haskell and containing a web server, templating, ORM, libraries (templating, gravatar, etc.).

Transactions without Transactions

Richard Kreuter and Kyle Banker on how to avoid classical RDBMS transactional systems by using compensation mechanisms, transactional messaging or transactional procedures.

Attila Szegedi on JVM and GC Performance Tuning at Twitter

Attila Szegedi talks about performance tuning Java and Scala programs at Twitter: how to approach GC problems, the importance of asynchronous I/O, when to use MySQL/Cassandra/Redis, and much more.

10 tips on how to prevent business value risk

One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.

Interview: Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives

InfoQ spoke to the authors of Software Systems Architecture on a couple of new topics, the System Context viewpoint and Agile, which have been added to the second edition.