[flomo]

All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).

Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)

eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.

[pjmlp]

J2EE was born out of a Objective-C framework based on collaboration between Sun and NeXT, actually.

[flomo]

I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.

WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.

[pjmlp]

Here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

If you know J2EE 1.0 and read the WebObjects for Java documentation, there will be very similar examples.

[flomo]

Hey PJ, I like your posts because you have the historical background on a lot of this stuff that industry has mostly forgotten.

But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.

[pjmlp]

Successful in some domains.

The daily Rails projects on HN is long gone, people eventually moved on into Clojure, than Elixir, Gleam, nowadays I lost track where to.

Some folks that missed out history lessons are now trying CORBA/J2EE with WebAssembly, WIT, and Kubernetes.

[flomo]

Yeah, I chose Rails just an example, could be PHP, could be Elixir, could be this dumbass bun shit, whatever is cool man and get you that VC.

I cannot recall any 'Show HNs' based on J2EE, not that it doesn't work.