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by yoda_sl 4942 days ago
If I was to develop some web framework in Objective-C I will at least try to mimic the WebObjects framework which has some great concept behind it. The main grief against WebObjects that should be avoided is that the framework layer to access the database aka EOF (Enterprise Objects Framework) was never designed to use a connection pool nor work nicely in a multi-threaded environment.

Sadly Apple stopped the development of that web solutions years ago and kept it for itself... I heard from various folks at Apple that there are still a few engineers improving it and it is being used a lot for iTunes. WebObjects got some bad reputation from many people that have no clue on how it works and citing that WebObjects can't even support database update and this why the Apple Online Store is often offline when Apple release a new product. This is total BS of course, since take the iTunes AppStore which serve the content for all stores: music, apps, books, movies, etc... And you barely see that iTunes Store is offline.

WebObjects was a great technology but Apple decided to keep it for itself.

3 comments

It hasn't kept it for itself, it is still submitting patches and releasing new versions. The toolchain is no longer supported, but Apple also provides patches to the open-source toolchain.

Lots, lots more at http://www.wocommunity.org/page/default but as others have said -- this is essentially a (very nice) Java framework with some Eclipse tool support.

What I really miss is the Objective-C framework, with EOF, and native Mac tools, bindings etc.

Well, the other issues with WebObjects is that at this point it is no longer Objective-C, but Java...
What are some examples of things that WebObjects did right? Are there still published docs for it?
You can still find many documentation online, a quick search on Google show a lot of results. There is a community of developer too with some docs/tutorial. Here is an overview: http://wiki.wocommunity.org/display/documentation/Overview-W...